Nature photography is kind of a prayer…expectation and wish for whatever this beautiful country should have been and still can be, amidst the uncertainty, the wars, and the non-ending violence and self absorbed truths also stand the innocence and beauty of the forests, the earth, the streams and the flowers. But they stand embarrassed, lost and blushing from shame waiting for their prayer to be fulfilled. ~Dubi Roman

Dubi Roman has always loved Impressionist painting. He sought a way to express an Impressionist vision of nature through photography - to see things in terms of light. Dubi Roman not only captures the play of light in the fields and forests; the shimmering images of a physical landscape. His works also suggest a different light. The stretches of wild flowers in the wood, the dark trunks of trees, are suffused with a more mysterious light; a spiritual radiance emanating from Nature.

This mystical light can be traced to Dubi Roman's roots in Safed and the Galilee. Born in Haifa in 1957, his father's family has lived in the mystical city of Safed in the Upper Galilee for five generations. His grandfather Yitzchak Roman was a Safed artist and sculptor. Although Roman lives in the city, he constantly escapes to Nature for sustenance. As is evident in his work, he particularly loves the forests. And yet his purpose is not simply to portray Israeli scenery, but to go beyond the specific place to the universalism of nature. To achieve serenity of spirit, the harmony he has been seeking all his life.

As the Impressionist painters went out of their studios to paint Nature, Dubi Roman achieves his surfaces, not primarily by manipulation of the image in the darkroom, but in the very act of taking the picture outdoors. The first exposure is taken slightly out of focus, and is followed by a second shot from a subtly different position. "A tiny movement of the body, and I can capture nuances that change the entire reality," says Roman. "I can never entirely predict the final image. Many elements come together. Many gates are opened."

Dubi Roman initially studied medical instrumentation, and then turned to film and television. He has worked as a video editor for Israeli Educational Television since 1983. All the while, he has refined his skill as a photographer studying professional photography through The New York Institute of Photography. He is married and has three boys, and today lives in Tel Aviv. These photographes are part of an exhibit to celebrate A Hundred Years of the Jewish National Fund which will be shown worldwide beginning October 10, 2001.

Rochelle Furstenberg
Literary and Art critic
Rochelle Furstenberg is a Jerusalem-based journalist and critic who writes on literary and cultural issues for the Jerusalem Report in Israel, and for Hadassah Magazine in the U.S. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and Moment Magazine.