Israel has been in a near-continuous state of conflict since the day of its proclamation, some seventy years ago. It has sustained its military through compulsory service. The overwhelming majority of those in its Defense Forces were born in Israel, raised alongside this notion of service. But theirs is not the only story of Israel’s soldiers.
There is a group of young men and women, non-Israelis numbering in the thousands, who come from countries around the world, including many from Australia, and volunteer into this legacy. Most choose to serve in combat positions. For them, the price of admission into Israeli society is this very service. They are called “lone soldiers”.
In The Cracks In Everything (Kehrer Verlag, 2020), Canadian photo-essayist Brant Slomovic considers their story through portraits and a survey of the Israeli landscape. He asks where they came from, who they are and why they sought out Israel as their home.
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Brant Slomovic (b. 1970, Montreal) is a Canadian photo-essayist based in Toronto, with a background as an emergency medicine physician. His experiences as a frontline doctor inform a unique perspective on the human condition, an attribute he carries with him into his role as a storyteller and image maker. He employs long-form documentary projects to examine narratives of culture and identity. What underlies his approach is a viewpoint that considers every person through a lens of commonality and connection.
Brant’s work has been published widely and resides in private collections internationally. In 2020 he published his first monograph The Cracks in Everything (Kehrer Verlag).
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