TEL AVIV.- This is the most comprehensive exhibition of works by Sharon Ya'ari (b. 1966) to date. It includes some 80 photograph of varied sizes and formats: color and black-and-white, digital and analog, as well as video works composed from stills, all photographed throughout Israel.

For the past decade, Sharon Ya'ari has described a melancholy state of tension between the ideal and the real. His photography is a scant remnant of the history it describes, with a choice of "small," almost marginal histories that express the physical and human components of the Israeli locus. The photographs reconstruct a private moment of concentration; an observation seeking to expose and reconstruct traces of action, the way things are placed and accumulated. In Ya'ari's most recent photographs, representing a kind of archaeology of Being, the viewers seem to participate in a constant transformation of space and time.

Urs Stahel, the exhibition's guest curator, says: "In Ya'ari's photographs, erosion discloses ancient layers, uncovers times gone by. History reveals itself. On the other hand, histories brand themselves onto the landscape, forming it and shaping it in ever overlapping layers. We are reminded of the butterfly effect, in which a single wingbeat can change the entire course of the world. What is, what should be, what would be, what is not: everything is inscribed upon the landscape, the objects, the furnishings of society. It is a shimmer of the possibility of small gestures and small movements, of imperceptible little efforts, a glimpse of the potential that lies in the uncovering of a layer, in the shining of a light, or in the moment when someone sets out to do something."

Color photographs until 2004 are chromogenic prints; all other photographs are pigment prints on archival paper.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by German leading art publisher Steidl. Designed by Michael Gordon, the book surveys the development of Ya'ari's photographic research in the past 15 years: direct photography, manipulated photography and photography that appropriates invalidated images.

The exhibition and the book courtesy of Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, with the support of Ruthi and Yoav Gottesman, Tel Aviv

The book is published with the support of the Israel National Lottery Council for the Arts and with the assistance of the Shpilman Institute for Photography.