@BRONFER

This book is the result of eight years spent around the Dead Sea, one of the most extraordinary and beautiful places on Earth. It is also a place where an ancient lesson remains unlearned. The title, Under Sodom Mountain, points to this—not simply as a biblical story, but as part of the human condition: the tension between beauty and destruction, between what we are given and what we choose to do with it. The book moves between two states of the same place. At times, it shows the calm beauty of the Dead Sea Valley. At others, it reveals the ecological damage caused by human actions. It took almost two years to find a way to hold these realities together, allowing the damage to interrupt the flow of calm and beauty without taking it over—to make that beauty feel more visible and fragile. Within this visual language, the two stories begin to speak to each other. The beauty of the Dead Sea moves quietly through the pages, while the damaged landscape carries the traces of human choices: carelessness, short-term thinking and quiet destruction. This idea continues in the physical form of the book. Designed by Teun van der Heijden, it is not only a photobook but a collectible art object in its own right. The ecological damage appears in double-page spreads printed over a layer of silver ink. The silver gives the landscape an unfamiliar and urgent presence, unsettling the calm rhythm of the book. Until the pages came off the press, we could not fully predict how the photographs would emerge from this process. That uncertainty became part of the work: just as the outcome of the printing process remained unknown, so too does the future of this landscape under the continuing pressure of human actions. A straight, unprinted line is pressed into the cover. You can feel it beneath your fingers. Every horizon in the book follows this line. One line. One horizon. One place to live. The edition is limited to 400 copies.