an Archeology of Fear and Desire

An Archeology of Fear and Desire is Frédéric Brenner's photographic essay on Israel, which he treats as both a place and a metaphor.

MACK published it in 2014 as a 72-page color hardcover. The essay is one part of This Place, a project Brenner started in 2006 in which twelve photographers look at Israel and the West Bank through a travelling exhibition, companion publications and live events. On his website Brenner dates his own essay 2009 to 2012 and describes people who seem cut off from their traumas yet are held by a history they prefer to ignore. He writes of a cycle of fear, denial and violence, and of the roles that social and religious structures assign to people.

Brenner was born in Paris in 1959 and studied literature and social anthropology at the Sorbonne. In 1978 he photographed Mea Shearim, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem, in what became his first book. From 1981 he spent 25 years photographing Jewish communities around the world. Diaspora: Homelands in Exile (Harper Collins, 2003) brought that work together and won a National Jewish Book Award for Visual Arts in 2004. Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York has represented him since 1990.