Review : The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey, Yaakov Israel

Yaakov Israel’s The Quest for the Man on the White Donkey is a thoughtful medi­ta­tion on the rela­tion­ship between land and social history in his home country of Israel. Trav­eling by car and inspired by the Amer­ican photo road trip, he assem­bled and collected these images from his chance meet­ings with the land and its people. While the back­ground and context of this work is neces­sarily of a highly polit­ical nature, the path Israel follows is of a more mundane, personal, and poet­i­cally medi­ta­tive tone, giving his images descrip­tive philo­soph­ical access to ques­tions about land and history.

The back­bone and strongest aspect of Yaakov’s book is his keen eye for describing land in such a way that illu­mi­nates its rela­tion­ship with human arti­fice and history, while at the same time preserving what is wild, untamed and suprahis­tor­ical about it. It is precisely this suprahis­tor­ical perspec­tive which Israel captures beautifully.

In one of the opening images we see a place, primarily ‘natural,’ that is, only mini­mally popu­lated with evidence of the human world. Sharply jutting into the bottom left of the frame is the termi­na­tion of a wall, which sput­ters out into a flaccid wire, signaling the haphazard and exhausted border of some construc­tion project. While elements of human building are indeed promi­nent, the overall content is not of industry, but desert land, barren and bleak, while holding the scat­tered remains of some aborted human endeavor. It sets the tone well for the images to follow.

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