Digitized Contestations

Gil Pasternak

Associate Professor of Social and Political Photographic Cultures, De Montfort University (UK) and Project Leader, Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts (funded by the European Commission)

For the onlooker, Israel may appear as the state of a united people and Israeli society politically coherent. Yet, the multiple range of photographic digital heritage initiatives currently prevailing in the country frame Israel as a zone of cultural conflicts. Especially since the 2009 election of a right-leaning government, Israeli citizens have turned to family photographs and digital technology to document, preserve, and popularize a range of cultural heritage creations, often unauthorized by the state or its official institutions. Pasternak will explain what has led Israeli citizens to use specifically family photographs in their attempts to diversify Israel’s socio-political sphere and what it can tell us about Israeli attitudes towards the state of Israel about 70 years after its foundation.

Gil Pasternak’s research investigates intersections of photography with political realities, especially in Israeli society, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and twentieth-century histories of Polish Jews. Recent publications include The Handbook of Photography Studies (2020), Visioning Israel–Palestine: Encounters at the Cultural Boundaries of Conflict (2020), and a special issue of the journal Photography & Culture titled “Photography in Transitioning European Communist and Post-Communist Histories” (2019). Since 2018 Pasternak has researched and supported community-led photographic heritage initiatives in zones of cultural conflicts.

Of Related Interest:

Gil Pasternak, Associate Professor of Social and Political Photographic Cultures, De Montfort University (UK)

Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts (DigiCONFLICT)