Shai Kremer’s Fallen Empires, published by Radius Books, takes as its subject a landscape in which conquest has left its deposits. Across 50 color plates, Kremer photographs Israel’s archaeological remains, historic architecture and contested ruins, asking how these sites function within the discourse surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the country’s future. His photographs look at ground where one empire succeeded another, and where military positions are still occupied, re-used and abandoned. The layered terrain he records is not backdrop but evidence: each ruin preserves the trace of a power that believed it would last.
The book also asks how that terrain is read now. By pairing ancient and modern remains, Kremer presses on the relationship between history and identity in the creation of modern Israel, treating archaeology and architecture as active participants in a political present rather than neutral relics. The project does not argue through captions alone; it works through the photographic encounter with stone, earth and fortification. This is a body of work with a specific argument about how the past is claimed, and the book is the form in which that argument is most fully assembled.
Kremer provides the photographs and an introduction, and the volume gathers essays by Ariella Azoulay, Meron Benvenisti, Amiram Oren, Talya Sason and Anne Wilkes Tucker. Their presence locates the images within historical, political and archaeological discussion rather than leaving them as an isolated sequence. For a collector, the combination of a single sustained photographic project with a substantial critical apparatus is the book’s defining structure: image and argument are meant to be read together.
The physical book supports that intention. Radius Books issued it as a clothbound hardcover with a tip-on, 136 pages and 50 color illustrations, a format that gives the sequence room and treats the photographs as plates rather than as illustration. The subject is one of the most closely observed and politically charged landscapes in contemporary photography, and Fallen Empires addresses it through ruins that outlast the powers that made them. Collectors of Photographs of Place and Documentary work will find here a considered, materially serious book.
