Every year, tens of thousands of Bible tourists travel to Israel to take a trip along the River Jordan, past the Sea of Galilee, also known as Lake Tiberias, to the Dead Sea. These water sources were once the setting against which, or in many cases in which, Bible stories took place. Jesus was baptised by his cousin John with water from the Jordan. He walked on the water of the Sea of Galilee, to reassure his fearful disciples who found themselves in a rickety boat during a storm. On the banks of that same sea, a miraculous catch of fish was made. After his resurrection, an unrecog nisable Jesus asked his disciples for something to eat. Unfortunately they hadn’t caught any fish that night. Jesus suggested they cast their nets in an un-expected place. They made a bumper catch and the disciples realised it was Jesus standing before them. In A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel, Belgian photographer Jan Ros-seel (b. 1979) portrays the ancient basin of the biblical Jordan. When you see the photographs of the bare mountain landscape with that winding stream in the valley — looking in places more like a creek than a great river — the Six-Day War and the politics of water seem far away. Yet that political aspect has an important part to play, as it does in all Rosseel’s work. A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel is a reflection of the journey Rosseel made down the Jordan, from the north of Israel to the south. On the way he crossed the Golan Heights and skirted the Sea of Galilee, ending up at the Dead Sea where the Jordan finally reaches its mouth, at 427 metres below sea level. As in his extensive project Belgian Autumn. A Confabulated History (2013), in A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel Rosseel uses a combination of archive images that he has manipulated, his own documentary photos of the landscape, and pictures fabricated in the studio. The studio photographs show isolated

plants and stones taken from the land-scape he was investigating. As a result of the combination of the three catego-ries of photographs, a visual story with a basis in truth is created that exists somewhere in between narration and documentation. Memories of historical events, how those events live on and how they are shaped into myths are important themes in Rosseel’s oeuvre. They come to the fore in this work-in-progress, which was first presented in the exhibition Power of Water (2014) at Fotodok in Utrecht, the Netherlands. A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel begins on the Golan Heights. Because of its strategic importance for the coun-try’s national security, the modern state of Israel took the region from Syria dur-ing the Six-Day War in 1967. Water is of great importance here too. In previous

years the War over Water had taken place, a series of conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbours over control of the Jordan as a source of water. Melt-water and rainwater from the mountains fed the rivers and underground wells with fresh water and was of considerable importance for all the neighbouring regions, including Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The beginning of A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel is a black-and-white photo of a man who is almost impos-sible to identify. He turns out to be Eli Cohen, born in Alexandria, who is still regarded in Israel as one of the heroes of the Six-Day War. Cohen adopted a false identity as Kamel Amin Thaabet, and by holding notorious parties at his home he infiltrated the highest circles of Syria’s military and political apparatus. Through his intelligence work he fore-stalled a Syrian plan to divert the Jordan in a way that would have seriously im-pacted upon Israel’s water supply. The initiative by Cohen that captured the imagination more than any other was his suggestion that eucalyptus trees should be planted on the Golan Heights. He advised the Syrians to plant the young trees close to every underground bunker and mortar position, to protect their soldiers against the searing heat of the mountains. Because of those eucalyptus trees, the Israeli air force was able un-erringly to locate and eliminate Syrian bunkers and mortar positions. Cohen’s cunning intervention made him one of the most appealing spies of the twen-tieth-century. The eucalyptus trees on the Golan Heights remain as silent wit-nesses to Cohen’s espionage network. It was in any case a period in which the secret services flourished. A number of the archive images in A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel are from the Corona Satellite Program, initiated by the CIA, aimed at collecting images of areas that were difficult to access, such as the USSR and China, and indeed the

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275Jan Rosseel

JOHN AKOMFRAH (b. 1957, GH) is a British artist, film maker and writer. Akomfrah studied at the University of Portsmouth. His works are charac-terised by their investigations into memory- post-colonialism, tempo-rality and aesthetics, and often ex-plores the experiences of migrant diasporas globally. He was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective which started in 1982. Akomfrah has had numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as SeMA; Seoul, Museum of Modern Art; New York City and Barbican, London.

BENOIT AQUIN (b. 1963, CA) lives and works in Montréal, Canada. He studied at the New England School of Photography. Since then, his work has been exhibited at The National Gallery of Canada, Somerset House in London, MOCA in San Diego, Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Moravieff-Apostal Museum in Moscow and Les Recontres de la Photographie, Arles. Aquin’s work is represented in a number of private collections in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and England. He has also participated in the pub-lishing of over a dozen press stories, monographs or photographic essays in order to share his environmental and humanitarian concerns with a broad public and is the first Laureate of the Prix Pictet. He is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montréal.

MARIAMA ATTAH (b. 1985, UK) is a photography curator and editor. With a BA in Photography and MA in Museum Studies, her interest in photography is centred on its ability to re-present visual culture and history. Before joining the editorial department of Foam Magazine, she was Programme Curator at Photo works responsible for develop-ing and programming exhibitions and events, including Brighton Photo Biennial and the Jerwood/Photo-works Awards. She was also editor of Photoworks Annual magazine. She has worked with a number of national and international artists and previous work roles include Assistant Curator at Compton Verney, Exhibi-tions and Events Manager at Iniva, and Assistant Officer, Visual Arts at Arts Council England.

KARIN BAREMAN (b. 1982, NL) is a London-based writer on photo-graphy and Curatorial Project Manager at Autograph, London. She studied Anthropology and Visual Anthropology in Amsterdam and Manchester, focusing on the rela-tionship between audio-visual culture and memories especially in relation to the former USSR. In 2015 she received the Milton Rogovin Research Fellowship from the Centre of Creative Photo graphy in Tucson, Arizona for her forthcoming research into the photo graphic representation of Appalachia. Alongside her role at Autograph she regularly writes about photography. Bareman’s articles have

been published in Unseen, Of the Afternoon, Photoworks, and American Suburb X to name a few.

MANDY BARKER (b. 1964, UK) is a photographer whose work investi-gates marine plastic debris in at-tempt to raise awareness about plastic pollution within the oceans, highlighting the effect on marine life and ourselves. Barker is an award winning photographer and was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2018 and the Magnum Foundation Fund, as well as being shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Award SPACE. Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals is published by overlapse.com. Mandy Barker’s work will be dis-played with East Wing Gallery at Photo London, 17 – 20 May, 2018, and at the Triennial of Photography Hamburg from 7 June, 2018.

JULIO BITTENCOURT (b. 1980, BR) is a photographer who grew up be-tween São Paulo and New York. His work has been published in various esteemed magazines including Esquire, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. In 2017 Bittencourt was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize and in 2013 won the XIII Prêmio Marc Ferrez de Fotografia. He is represented by two galleries: Galeria Lume and Galeria da Gavea.

MICHAEL BODENMANN (b. 1978, CH) is an artist who lives and works in Zürich and St. Gallen. He obtained a BA Media & Art in Photography and recently a Master of Fine Arts at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. Bodenmann has been the recipient of various awards and grants of which most recently the Appenzell Ausser-rhodische Kulturstiftung grant. He is currently artist in residence at La Casa Suiza de la Boca in Buenos Aires.

BOOMOON (b. 1955, KR) is a photo-grapher living in Gangwon Province, South Korea. He studied at the photo graphy department of Chung-Ang University. Since the 1980s Boomoon has produced large format photographs of vast expanses of sea, sky and land as a means of self- reflection, which Charlotte Cotton has described as contemplating “the unknowable and uncontrollable character of nature.” Boomoon’s work has been exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions internationally. His work is held in public collections in-cluding IBM Art Collection, New York; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul and Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama. He is represented by Flowers Gallery, London and New York.

BEN BURBRIDGE (b. 1981, UK) is Course Leader of the new Photo-graphy: History, Theory, Practice MA, launching at University of Sussex in October 2018. He has curated exhi-bitions including Revelations: Experi-ments in Photography (Media Space/National Media Museum, 2015) and

Agents of Change: Photo graphy and the Politics of Space (Brighton Photo Biennial 2012). The editor of two publications Revelations; Experi-ments in Photo graphy (MACK, 2015) and Photo graphy Reframed (I B Tauris, 2018) he is currently complet-ing his first monograph, provisionally titled Nothing Personal: Photography In, and After, the Age of Communica-tive Capitalism.

TIM CLARK (b. 1981, UK) is a curator, writer and editor. Since 2008, Clark has been the Editor-in-Chief and Director of the online contemporary photography magazine 1000 Words. His writings have appeared in Time Lightbox, Objectiv, Photoworks Annual, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, and The British Journal of Photography as well as in various exhibition catalogues. He was previ-ously Associate Curator at Media Space, the Science Museum, London; and Guest Curator of Photo Oxford 2017 together with Greg Hobson. Clark has organised numerous solo exhibitions with artists such as Alec Soth, Martin Parr, Edgar Martins, Mariken Wessels and Peter Watkins. Group exhibitions have included Rebecoming (2014) and the two-person exhibition, Lexicon of Crime: Russian Criminal Tattoos (2017).

CAROLINE VON COURTEN (b. 1983, DE) works around the image/frame of photography. This is achieved through researching for her PhD dissertation on theoretical and material connotations of the photo-graphic surface, or by curating exhi-bitions on paper (Foam Magazine) or in physical spaces (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Nederlands Fotomu-seum, Goethe Institute & the Dutch Culture Center Shanghai). With a background in Visual Culture Studies (University of Utrecht & Monash University, Melbourne) and a Master’s degree in Photographic Studies ( Leiden University) she followed her obsession for a medium reflective of understanding anything that shapes our visual surroundings.

T.J. DEMOS (b. 1966, US) is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Found-er and Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Docu-mentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonial-ism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013).

ELSPETH DIEDERIX (b. 1971, KE) lives and works in Amsterdam. She stud-

ied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and later went on to study at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. Her work has been exhibited extensively across the Netherlands and has also been shown internationally at venues such as Aperture, New York; Gallery Ludovic de Wavrin, Paris; and Erasmus Huis in Jakarta. Diederix has published five books. She is represented by Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam. De Tuinen van Elspeth Diederix is on show at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, the Netherlands from June 23 – September 30, 2018.

ODDNÝ EIR (b. 1972, IS) is an Icelandic author and part-time goat and sheepfarmer. Two of her works published in English are The Blue Blood and The Land of Love and Ruins (translated by Philip Roughton), the latter won the European Union prize of literature and the Icelandic Women’s prize. Eir studied philo-sophy and languages in Reykjavík, Stockholm, Budapest, and Paris. She dropped her thesis when she moved to New York and started writing for artists (among them Roni Horn and Hreinn Friðfinnsson) and to become a writer publishing novels, proses, and poetry. She collaborated with Björk on nature preservation projects and lyrics and she ran a visual arts space in New York called Dandruff Space with her brother, the archae-ologist Uggi Ævarsson. Currently, Eir is involved in an artwork central to the notion of water, which is an installation by her mother, Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir in Finland.

MASAHISA FUKASE (b. 1934-2012, JP) was a Japanese photographer born in the town of Bifuka. He graduated from the Nihon University College of Arts Photography Department in 1956. In the mid-1970s Fukase set up a photographic school, The Work-shop, with Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu. His work has been exhibited widely at institutions such as MoMA, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London and Fonda-tion Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris to name a few. Fukase has also won many prizes including the sec-ond Ina Nobuo Award in 1976 for his exhibition Karasu as well as the Special Award at the eighth Higashi-kawa Photography Awards in 1992.

KATY GRANNAN (b. 1969, US) is a photographer renowned for her intimate portraits of strangers. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and later went on to obtain her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Grannan has exhibited her work extensively in both solo and group exhibitions, she has exhibited at international venues including Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria; Fifty One Fine Art Photography, Antwerp; and the Guggenheim Museum, Spain. She is represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Salon 94 in New York.

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All images from the series A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel, 2014 © Jan Rosseel, courtesy of the artist and The Ravestijn Gallery

Golan Heights. The images were created between 1959 and 1972 using a camera fixed to a satellite. They were not made public until the 1990s. Rosseel also uses photos from propaganda books about the Six-Day War. We travel with Rosseel past what may be Eli Cohen’s grave. We arrive by night at the Wadi Qelt in the desert of Judea on the West Bank near Jericho, where old irrigation canals can still be found. Moving further down the Jor-dan, we cross an agricultural area that runs parallel to the banks. In this re-gion, more than 2,000 years after Jesus’ miraculous act, large numbers of tilapia are being farmed. In the impossible dryness of the desert, water from the Jordan is used to breed the fish on large farms in plastic ponds. Meanwhile, the desiccated earth cracks open. The land-scape around the Dead Sea is becoming increasingly dry. Water flowing in from the Jordan largely evaporates there, making the sea a repository of minerals. We have reached the final desti-nation of our journey along the Jordan, Israel’s second largest water resource. It’s a journey in which many different impressions and memories are squeezed together into a condensed and handy atlas of an area of huge historical, religious, cultural and political value, for which water is of essential impor-tance, and about which there is still a great deal to tell. A Condensed Atlas of Water in Israel deserves to grow into An Extensive Atlas of Water in Israel.

—— Text by Kim Knoppers