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Shabtai Pinchevsky

Shabtai Pinchevsky

Anti Mapping / With Miki Kratsman


Al-Jammama, Position: 31°29’51"N 34°41’7"E, Altitude: 164.2 m, Timestamp: 17.12.2018 – 13:27

In Anti-Mapping, a collaborative project with long-time documentary photographer Miki Kratsman, we’ve been looking at the surface of the Earth as a photographic surface and a record-keeper. Our aim was to produce geographical documentation of the ongoing displacement of Palestinian and Bedouin communities throughout the territories governed by the State of Israel.

Our project follows a few of the remains of about 400 Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba of 1948, whose population either fled or were expelled by Israeli military forces. The existence and presence of this past world were visually erased from the Israeli landscape and consciousness. The locations of those villages were subject to forestation, resettlement of Jewish immigrants, militarization, and more. Names were changed, and the locations of those places were erased from maps.
al-Burj, Position: 31°54’9”N 35°1’14”E, Altitude: 276.6 m, Timestamp: 27.10.2018 - 10:15

The unrecognized Bedouin villages are scattered throughout the Negev/Naqab desert area and are referred to by the State of Israel as “diaspora” and “illegal settlements”. Among these villages are historical ones that predate the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Their first displacement took place as the State of Israel started to concentrate the Arab Bedouins population in the Sayag area – a territory between the cities Beer Sheva, Arad, and Dimona. A military rule was imposed on the population and much of the land in the Negev was declared state lands.

Our documentation serves as an alternative to the restrictive visibility enforced by the Israeli government, which limits civilian access to maps and satellite imagery of the land. The resolution limit that Israeli aerial photography is subject to, does not allow for the gathering of geographical evidence on these places, which further obstructs the ability to document their history. By using drone photography and photogrammetry techniques, we have produced aerial views at a resolution that renders every rock, cinder block, grave, and more, at their finest detail, enabling a forensic study of the Earth, as a testimony to the atrocities endured by these communities.


Khan al-Ahmar, Position: 31°48’42"N 35°20’21"E, Altitude: 236.4 m, Timestamp: 25.6.2018 – 12:20


Anti-Mapping at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, March - October 2021
INFO ︎︎︎

Shabtai Pinchevsky is a photographer and digital media artist currently based in New York. In his creative practice, Pinchevsky uses digital tools to examine archival photographic materials and their relations to geographies of conflict and displacement. His practice is deeply engaged with issues of social justice, human rights, and anti-colonialism, and their application in art and media. Pinchevsky works with 3D modeling, mapping, internet-based art, and more, to investigate the political complications of the photographic medium, while reflecting on his own implications within the field.