Israeli Sniper Wall
Simon Norfolk
Photography
On View:
Simon Norfolk’s Israeli Sniper Wall depicts a border zone: a wall built between the Israeli settlement of Gilo, outside Jerusalem, and an adjacent Palestinian village, to protect Israeli settlers from gunfire. To brighten the view on the Israeli side, the wall has been painted with a landscape, the view as it would have been without the Palestinian village on the opposite side. The elegant composition, muted colors, and smooth tonalities of the photograph add to its almost otherworldly character. Norfolk's use of an old-fashioned mahogany and brass field camera—a large-format view camera with a slow shutter speed—also contributes to the epic quality of the image: a beauty in conflict, or at least in jarring juxtaposition, with the problematic subject at hand. Norfolk's extraordinary ability to fuse the timeless and the topical resonates with the Museum’s great collection of landscape paintings steeped in meaning, most notably the “Great Pictures” of the American West, such as Alfred Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (1863).
MEDIUM
Chromogenic print
DATES
2007
DIMENSIONS
40 × 50 in. (101.6 × 127 cm)
frame: 41 1/4 × 51 1/4 × 2 5/8 in. (104.8 × 130.2 × 6.7 cm) (show scale)
COLLECTIONS
Photography
ACCESSION NUMBER
2007.63.2
CREDIT LINE
Emily Winthrop Miles Fund
MUSEUM LOCATION
This item is not on view
CAPTION
Simon Norfolk (British, born Nigeria, 1963). Israeli Sniper Wall, 2007. Chromogenic print, 40 × 50 in. (101.6 × 127 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2007.63.2. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Photograph courtesy of the artist and Bonnie Berubi Gallery, CUR.2007.63.2_Bonnie_Berubi_Gallery_photo.JPG)
IMAGE
overall, CUR.2007.63.2_Bonnie_Berubi_Gallery_photo.JPG. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Bonnie Berubi Gallery, 2008
"CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
RIGHTS STATEMENT
© Simon Norfolk
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