His photographs and films transcribe images of sites of historical significance—the Judean Desert, Sarajevo, Auschwitz, the Galicia region of Ukraine, the Lister Route in the Pyrenees (on which Walter Benjamin made his ill-fated exodus from Nazi-occupied France)—into ciphers of psychological disruption.
Such scenes may not seem out of the ordinary unto themselves, but, through the artist’s focused attention and treatment they evoke the emotional resonance of what has transpired—most often, violence, and, more significantly, the ghosts of war’s most egregious detritus, its refugees.
Moreover, the vistas and horizons of, for instance, "Between Places" (1998–2000), "White Noise" (1999–2000), "The Clearing/Liquidation" (2005), and "Evaders" (2009), recall Romantic depictions of the sublime.
They conjure precedents in both photography, such as the vistas of Andreas Gursky and the landscapes of the American South by Sally Mann, and painting, by J .M.
In "Pomegranate", a film that references Juan Sanchez Cotan’s 17th-century still life and Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photography, a high velocity bullet flies across the frame in slow motion and obliterates a suspended pomegranate fruit, bursting it open and wheeling it slowly into the air like a smashed violated mouth spraying seeds.