The exhibition addresses the complexities of life in present-day Israel. The photographs of Hasidic men, teenagers, armed forces, and others – all of who make up the fabric of the country – evoke the biblical era, engage the realities of today, and provide a glimpse into the future. One of the works, which measures 4×10.5 feet, shows a seaside settlement in Gaza that Israeli soldiers evacuated last summer during Israel’s historic withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The settlement – Shirat Hayam – is also the name of the biblical song that celebrates the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. This new image by Barry Frydlender documents a contemporary parallel to the biblical story.

One of the other photographs in the exhibition, Waiting, 38 Years, adds yet another dimension to this scene. In the summer of 2005, while shooting the footage for what would become Shirat Hayam, Frydlender turned around and photographed a group of Bedouin who were watching, waiting, and hoping to return to the land that was theirs until 1967.

The artist’s visceral, startlingly powerful images reflect the fact that in Israel the past and the present, the personal and the political are all inextricably linked. Even those works in the exhibition that depict scenes elsewhere than Israel – a picture of the London tube – or show a quieter Israel – a portrait of Frydlender’s daughter and two friends sleeping – directly engage the viewer with scenes of the daily global drama that affect us all.

Barry Frydlender achieves much of his effect through an ambitious, painstaking method. Rather than producing a conventional, one-shot photograph, he shoots many pictures of the same scene, over time and from different angles, and then masterfully manipulates the images to create an all-encompassing continuum. In essence, time is compressed. Shirat Hayam is composed of hundreds of individual images; the viewer is drawn in with an overwhelming vividness and immediacy. It’s not one instant, it’s many instants put together, and there’s a hidden history in every image, says the artist of his composites that merge fiction and nonfiction.