ドイツ人アーティスト、トーマス・シュトゥルート（Thomas Struth）の作品集。本書は2009年と2011年、そして2014年にイスラエルおよびイスラエル軍占領下のヨルダン川西岸地区において撮影された16枚の作品から構成。まるで作家が一カ所に留まりながら一点を見つめていたかのように、それぞれレンズが向けられた景色が一つの地学的・政治的現実に帰着し、イスラエルとヨルダン川西岸地区における状況が、人間社会の営みの縮図であるかのように描写されていおり、我々が生きるこの世界の相容れない多様性と本質を究明し「領域における対立の粒子」を浮き彫りにしようとしている。巻末にドイツ人美術史家のUlrich Loockによるエッセイを収録。パレスチナ自治区が直面している複雑さを12名の世界的写真家達の目を通して検証するプロジェクト「This Place」への参加から制作された作品を元に発行。

The irreconcilable coexistence of two nations determines every aspect of reality... No image exists that overcomes this division. - Ulrich Loock

This book brings together sixteen photographs made by Thomas Struth in Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2009, 2011 and 2014. Struth continued his practice of creating singular images, each within one of the strictly segregated subject fields he has developed through his career: street photographs, portraits, landscapes and photographs of high technology. Each image carries the enduring complexity and visual distillation of human experience for which Struth is known. Approaching the sheer diversity and quiddity of the inhabited world, he attempts to represent what he has referred to as “a particle of the conflict of the region”, to photograph, fragment by fragment, the conflicted political and social landscape. Ulrich Loock proposes in his essay in the book that this series of images is unified by “strata of antitheses [which] reveal themselves as a matrix running through the work”, as Struth attempts to grasp the circumscribed reality of a region where coexistence has failed, a reality that is inaccessible to photography.  In some ways, this extraordinary body of work is a departure from Struth’s traditional practice: all exposures are related to one single geographical and political reality, as if Struth found every aspect of his photographic vision in one place, and as though Israel and the West Bank were a geographical container for the scope of the human condition.