The images shown here come from zmanashan (roughly, “smoke time” in Hebrew), an Instagram project I began during Operation Guardian of the Walls in May 2021. Images of smoke clouds seem to fill our screens — on news sites, across social media feeds, in photographs and video fragments — and in the years since, they have only become more difficult to escape.
I began taking screenshots, enlarging them, cropping them, applying filters, and isolating the clouds from the events they documented. The closer I moved into the image, the less certain it became. Smoke turned into texture, color, light and shadow. Images of violence became strangely abstract — and sometimes disturbingly beautiful. That contradiction disturbed me, and eventually became the starting point for my research into the relationship between photography and clouds.
Those early experiments eventually led to my M.A. thesis, in which I explored the relationship between photography and clouds throughout the history of the medium. The cloud became a model for thinking about photography as something unstable and shifting — at once material and virtual, visible and elusive.
Photography has never simply shown us the world as it is. From the earliest composite photographs, in which skies and landscapes were photographed separately and joined into a single image, to contemporary digital manipulation and AI, the image has always been something we act upon — something we crop, reconstruct, interpret and circulate.
Since the October 7, 2023 attacks and the long war that followed, returning to these images has become more difficult. The clouds seem so much darker now, and the questions they carry feel more urgent. We seem to see everything, and yet often understand almost nothing. Images arrive from every direction, while certainty remains elusive.
And still, I return to one thought: we do not only act upon images; images act upon us. They allow us to imagine, and imagination can become reality. Even beneath the shadow cast by clouds of war, there remains the possibility of imagining another future — one in which clouds of smoke are no longer the products of violence and war, but once again become nothing more than shifting forms of light and shadow.
The following materials are in Hebrew.