Daniel Tchetchik
Sunburn
“The next day he woke me up at 4:30 in the morning to watch the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee – the most beautiful sunrise in the world, he assured me. We sat on the shore and waited. At five o’clock the sun came up. By 5:15 it was trying to kill me, at 5:30 it succeeded, and I’ve been dead ever since.” – Meir Shalev
Sunburn is a body of work which explores the effects of the warming climate on the human condition. Sunburn approaches the element of light not in a romantic manner, but rather through an approach that aspires to reflect the essence of its source. A sun that warms and burns, comforts and wounds, hurts and heals. “SunBurn” explores the relationship between the photographer and his country, Israel, through the narrative of heat. It is a regional story that also aims to raise awareness and questions regarding global warming, our dwindling resources and how the desertification in the region has influenced the global balance. Photographing throughout the country in the months leading up to the 2014 war in Gaza, during the war and in the months after, Tchetchik conveys the often contradictory effects of the Middle Eastern climate on the physical and metaphysical landscape – a sun that warms, nurtures and comforts, burns, strikes and scars. A source that disregards borders and without discrimination, affects us all.
Bio
Daniel Tchetchik is a staff photographer and the chief editor of the photography blog of “Haaretz” Newspaper. He has displayed his personal works in leading museums and galleries in Israel as well as on international stages in NYC, San Francisco and India. Tchetchik’s works are part of the collections of The Museum of Tel-Aviv, The Museum of Ramat-Gan, The Peter Blum Gallery, The Marc Rich Foundation, the French Institute, R2M Tchetchik divides his time between personal projects and documentary assignments, many times each approach provides inspiration for the other. His photographs have appeared in the New York Times , Frankfurter Allgemeine, National Geographic, Myself Magazine, Haaretz Newspaper and more.
Nice. I like mixing Black and white and Colour and there is a certain feeling of heat but it doesn’t give me a flavour of global warming. Seems a pretty hard thing to show and apart from Chasing ice I don’t think I’ve seen a set of pictures that does.
Yes, hharry, it definitely gives a feeling of heat, but since its focused on such a hot part of the world in the first place, it kind of seems like heat that has always been, the kind of heat I remember from the Southwest. I do have to say that in some of these images, the first one in particular, the heat looks absolutely inescapable – an apt statement, I fear, for global warming.