Internationally acclaimed photographer Shai Kremer concentrates on landscape photography. He begun his celebrated series Infected Landscapes over ten years ago, while still a student at Tel Aviv's art school 'Camera Obscura'. Since then he has created over one hundred images documenting the presence of man in the landscape, including the traces of the many layers of societal, political and military powers which have battled for territorial dominance in Israel in recent decades. While in some images the remains of military struggle are clearly foregrounded, in many compositions the desert panorama or hilltop may contain enigmatic remnants of human occupation only decipherable through the Kremer's given titles.

As the artist has stated concerning this series:

The images I shoot are often formally attractive, orderly compositions and apparently 'innocent' and poetic. This parallels the defense mechanisms developed by Israelis striving for normalcy and to protect themselves from the reality of the current political situation. The scars concealed in the landscape correspond to the wound in the collective unconscious of the country. The landscape, infected with the loaded sentiments of the ongoing conflict, becomes a platform for discussion.

Kremer has recently begun a new body of work entitled Fallen Empires which carries concerns visible in Infected Landscapes back through many previous centuries. Tracing the walls and monumental ruins of ancient imperialism on Israeli soil, Kremer's sweeping and often visually seductive compositions record remnants of several hundred years of history in one viewpoint. Kremer's new works engage with the transience of civilisation as well as our own mortality by questioning, in the artist's words, "the legitimacy of imperialism."

Concurrently, Kremer's focus has also broadened to New York City, where he has been living for the past several years. Exploring the city from its outermost edges, Kremer discovers the abandoned calm of the many local backwaters far removed from the bustling centre, the optimal vantage point from which to investigate industrial growth on an intimate scale. Kremer has described of these New York images:

I found myself attracted more and more to these ex-centric spaces where I could see some horizon, some land in an undeveloped stage, temporary raw surfaces, soil... Indeed most of the images depict a landscape in change. Such fast pace of development struck me, especially when compared to home, in my Kibbutz, where time stands still.

Shai Kremer was born and raised in Israel and he now lives in New York where he received his MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in 2005. He has exhibited widely in the USA, China, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Spain and Sweden and his work is in numerous museum collections including Tel Aviv Contemporary Art Museum, the Jerusalem Israel Art Museum, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the San Francisco MoMA and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Kremer's work is presently on show at Tate Modern in the exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera through October 2010.

James Hyman Gallery represents Shai Kremer in the United Kingdom.