Shai Kremer’s Infected Landscape, published by Dewi Lewis in 2008, addresses a terrain that has been shaped as much by military preparation and conflict as by geography. Across 120 pages and 66 color photographs, Kremer records the ruins, remnants, and training environments that have become part of Israel’s contemporary topography. His concern is not the decisive moment of battle but the slow residue of preparedness: the scarred ground, the concrete rubble, the places where the apparatus of war has left its imprint on both land and collective memory.

Two sites anchor the work. The so-called Chicago military training centre carries decades of accumulated reconstruction, its built environment adjusted over time to simulate different war settings, from Lebanon to Gaza City, and it also contains an area built to resemble a refugee camp. At the Tze’elim base in the south, the Urban Warfare Training Center, unveiled to the press in 2007, is a mock city built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with substantial U.S. military funding. Its modular structures can be reconfigured to represent specific towns; it includes shops, a grand mosque, a hospital, and a Kasbah quarter, and a cemetery that doubles as a soccer field depending on the scenario. Openings knocked through house walls replicate the passages soldiers make while moving through urban areas, while charred cars and burned tyres line the roads. Cameras and an audio system simulate helicopters, mortar rounds, and prayer calls.

Kremer photographs these environments with orderly, almost classical composure. His compositions are aesthetic and controlled, and that very poise creates friction: the beauty of the image sits uneasily beside the grimness of what is depicted. The book’s title proposes the landscape itself as a carrier of disease, a surface marked by wounds that correspond to injuries in the Israeli collective consciousness. The result is not reportage in the conventional sense but a sustained meditation on how conflict is spatially rehearsed and materially sedimented.

For collectors, the work’s significance lies in its early and rigorous reading of the militarized landscape. It was made as the Tze’elim facility entered public view, and it treats simulation itself as a subject rather than a backdrop. With 66 color plates in a hardback volume, Infected Landscape belongs to the documentary turn of the 2000s, when photographers began examining the architecture of conflict rather than its flashpoints, and it remains a considered example of that inquiry.