Reconfiguring the Aerial: (In)visibility in the Naqab and Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom

These two photos were taken around sixty-six years apart in the same region of the Naqab, an arid region also known as the Negev in Hebrew, in the south of Palestine. The first photo, shot on film by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) as part of the effort to survey the terrain in 1945, was taken at around 15,000 ft above the earth.¹ The second, taken by artist Fazal Sheikh as part of his Desert Bloom series in 2011,² shows the Bedouin cemetery in al-ʽAraqīb—the ancestral lands of the al-Uqbi family— at an oblique angle much closer to the ground. This same plot of land roughly corresponds to section 17 in the RAF photograph.³

This region is the homeland of the Bedouin village of al-ʽAraqīb and the home of the al-Uqbi tribe, who have lived in this area since at least the 1500s, until Israeli authorities forcibly displaced them in 1951, claiming the land as State property. Despite this, Bedouins continue to return to and occupy their lands, facing ongoing persecution and repeated demolitions of their housing. As of October 3, 2022, Israeli authorities have demolished al-ʽAraqīb 207 times.⁴

Although he understood his chances of winning were slim, Nuri al-Uqbi appealed his tribe’s land rights case to Israeli District and Supreme Courts. Critical to these court proceedings were analyses of the British aerial photos, which were used to establish proof of the Bedouin tribe’s history on the land—or lack thereof, according to the Israeli State. In his account, Shlomo Ben Yosef, the aerial interpreter expert hired by Nuri al-Uqbi’s legal team, pointed to “extensive and continuous Bedouin agricultural settlement,” wells, routes, tent encampments, and livestock pens made visible upon meticulous analysis of these images.⁵ Yet Supreme Court Justice Sarah Dovrat denied these analyses as adequate material proof of Bedouin history:

Dovrat: How do you know that they were inhabited? Can you see people?

Ben Yosef: You cannot see people in this aerial photograph but you can see the yard, and you see that the ground is in use. […] Ya’ari Roash [lawyer for the state]: You will agree with me that there are a number of things you cannot see.⁶

The use of aerial photographs invokes questions concerning the role of “visibility” in the Naqab Bedouin struggle. How does the view “from above” make visible, and simultaneously obfuscate, histories of Naqab Bedouin presence? Contemporarily, how does Sheikh’s photography reappropriate the aerial perspective to examine the Bedouins’ ongoing struggle and the violence committed against them?

Embedded within these concerns is the historical power of the aerial perspective, which imbues the photograph with an aura of objectivity; its seemingly inhuman positionality helps render the photograph as a neutral, documentary medium. The materiality of the photo is also at stake here: reality is represented through an amalgamation of film grains or pixels. This viewpoint is, in many ways, a product of modernity and the technologies that make this perspective possible and accessible—historically, to a select few. By the 20th century, colonial, state, and military powers had incorporated the concept of this “all-seeing” perspective into techniques of territorial management and control.⁷ The ability to visualize territory with this new-found gaze correlated with the state’s ability to exert power.

As the aerial perspective made new vantages possible, it simultaneously reconfigured ways of seeing. The elimination of the horizon can collapse the vertical, producing a flat plane, and in some cases, eliminating senses of dimensionality. The height inherent in the aerial positionality makes land legible through the simplification, or even erasure, of certain elements. In the case of the military photos, all of these factors contribute to the condensing of the land into a two-dimensional, abstracted surface.

In court cases between the State and Naqab Bedouin defendants, viewing the land as surface contributed to the State’s erasure of Naqab Bedouin existence and traces on the land. In these cases, Israeli representatives read granules of film as “abstract” or illegible in analyses of the images as evidence for Bedouin history in the Naqab. Abstraction was not just a fluke of outdated technology; it was a means for the State to justify its right to land and the violence it commits.

While the military photos were neither taken nor intended to be viewed and analyzed through an aesthetic lens, their aesthetic properties continue to dictate how these photos are read and understood by the State and other viewers. What sets Sheikh’s photography apart from the military’s own photographs and their interpretation by the State is his engagement with and exploration of the aerial perspective.

Both the military and Sheikh’s photographs stem from a desire to visualize what is on the ground. In the case of the RAF, the 2,827 pictures were taken for archaeological purposes, not to capture Bedouin life and agriculture.⁸ Yet they did so inadvertently—mainly at the margins of the photographs, slightly out of focus.⁹ Sheikh, on the other hand, turned to the aerial out of a frustration with his ability to capture the Naqab Bedouin struggle on the ground; “I wanted a sense of how this area of radical upheaval fitted into the broad sweep of the desert.”¹⁰ Many of his photographs reveal the impact, violence, and ruins of ongoing Bedouin displacement by Israeli forces. Moreover, they reveal the transformation of the landscape caused by mining, military training camps, afforestation (the widespread planting of trees by the Jewish National Fund), the military’s demolition of Bedouin homes, and the expansion of Israeli settlements. Ultimately, Sheikh’s work reappropriates the aerial photograph by orienting his series spatially and cartographically. His photographs contribute to a four-dimensional understanding of the land and the struggle it holds by both situating his works temporally and documenting history as it is made visible on the land itself.

Desert Bloom reconfigures the aerial perspective by addressing and acknowledging the positionality of the camera. Sheikh photographed this series in October and November 2011, at the beginning of the rainy season, when the first rains had cleared the dust and haze from the air.¹¹ The crops in this area had been recently harvested, but the land had yet to be seeded.¹² Leaning out of a two-seat airplane, Sheikh took the photos at an oblique angle, usually in late morning, when shadows revealed the fluctuations of the topography below.¹³

The military photos taken decades earlier, in contrast, were taken around 15,000 feet above the ground, reducing the resolution of the film. At this height, the grave stones and mounds of earth crucial to identifying Bedouin history in the al-Uqbi cemetery appeared as the size of a single grain in the negative.¹⁴ Here, the land is ultimately depicted as a surface whose three-dimensionality (its topography and the atmosphere above it) is collapsed, degrading the legibility of Bedouin life on the ground below. On the other hand, in Sheikh’s photographs the surface of the land reveals not only what is immediately present but the traces of the past, nearly erased: the dark patches of livestock pens, demolished Bedouin homes, fields and wells under the rows of freshly planted saplings. As Eyal Weizman writes, the relative dryness in the Naqab conserves traces on the ground better than any other environment.¹⁵ He contends that the “surface of the desert thus resembles a photographic inscription, exposed to the direct and indirect contacts of human and climatic forces in a way similar to how film is exposed to light. This makes aerial images artifacts of double exposure: they are photographs of photographs.”¹⁶ The understanding of the land as photograph helps elucidate how history is encapsulated, contested, and imposed onto these landscapes. While the flattening of the military photos degrades the visibility of Bedouin life on the ground, Sheikh’s photos emphasize ongoing Bedouin presence and history. However, unlike a still photograph, the surface of the land is in constant flux as the State continues to bulldoze Naqab Bedouin homes and uproot their orchards, and as Naqab Bedouins persist in rebuilding their homes again and again.

Although the photograph as a medium is inherently static, Sheikh’s project works to situate the sites he photographs within their evolving temporal and cartographic contexts. By both providing the exact coordinates of each photograph and pin-pointing each location on a map in his online edition, Sheikh invites viewers to understand his photographs as instances in an ongoing history, struggle, and geographic evolution. Moreover, he prompts us to study the transformation of these sites using the timeline function on Google Earth.¹⁷ His subversion of the static nature of the photograph encourages an understanding of the land not as an immutable surface, but as an ever-changing archive.

In theory, softwares such as Google Earth should democratize the ability to read the politics and violences that play out on the surface of the earth, including the destruction that rockets and Israeli bulldozers inflict on Naqab Bedouin villages.¹⁸ Yet today, publicly available satellite images of Israel are intentionally degraded to one meter per pixel (in contrast with the half-meter per pixel common nearly everywhere else) following Israel’s lobbying against United States administration, which regulated the distribution of high-resolution satellite images of the region by American companies.¹⁹ This condenses the visual representation of the landscape and obscures details that reveal counternarratives to the colonial denial of Naqab Bedouin presence and history. At this diminished resolution, many structures in Bedouin villages remain just under the threshold of visibility and detectability.²⁰

In these ways, the abstraction generated by the aerial perspective is still weaponized by the Israeli State to obfuscate its colonial processes. It is here that Sheikh’s work can perhaps allow us to reimagine the power of an abstracted viewpoint. In contrast with the military photos, which continue to be interpreted as an objective record of “what was on the ground,” Sheikh’s collection blurs the boundaries of the photograph as documentation and the photograph as art. Although the technologies he utilizes (digital camera, colour, precise GPS localization) give him the ability to represent the events on the ground with as much realism as possible, Sheikh’s series continues to lean into the abstraction of the aerial perspective; we do not always know what we are looking at.

This photo shows smudged black circles on a sandy backdrop. The fainter imprints softly echo their darker counterparts in the space above. The image indicates a repetition, a series of incomplete erasures, or conversely a rebuilding. The earth has recorded the aftermath of some event, even if we aren’t certain what happened based on this image alone. Here, the abstraction of the photograph contributes to a visceral comprehension of violence and displacement. In contrast with the abstraction of the military photos, which are read as “white spaces” or blanks in the historical archive,²¹ Sheikh’s work reengages the power of unclarity to convey the emotional devastation of the ongoing Bedouin struggle.

Ultimately, it is the temporality of the land archive, its representation of history as process, that illuminates Israeli State violence: the repeated demolition of Naqab Bedouin homes, the steadily encroaching forests, the uprooting of Bedouin crops and trees. It is in the interest of the State to present land and space as “fixed,” static, in place—as incontestable State space, and thus incontestable State history. In this way, it is in the interest of the State to uphold the veracity of the photo as a static representation of history and to interpret its abstracting schema as evidence of a lack of Bedouin history. But Desert Bloom reimagines the historic implications of abstraction and legibility, conveying the devastation of the settler colonial process through a medium and viewpoint that has historically supported this very process. By situating his photos geographically, temporally, and spatially, Sheikh engages the aerial to portray the land archive in flux, recording not only State violence but Naqab Bedouins’ persistent residence and presence. 

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Mika Yassur is a writer, wine bartender, and photographer in Ridgewood, NY by way of Santa Cruz, Paris, and Western Massachusetts. They graduated from Smith College with a degree in Government and Philosophy of Aesthetics. When they’re not in a cafe writing about space and land, they’re most likely dancing or running slightly late.

1. Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change at the Threshold of the Negev Desert (Göttingen: Steidl, 2015), 56.
2. Fazal Sheikh, “Desert Bloom,” online edition, accessed January 15, 2024, https://www.fazalsheikh.org/online_editions/desert_bloom
3. Image analysis performed by Eyal Weizman in The Conflict Shoreline.
4. “Israel Razes Palestinian Village for 207th Time,” Middle East Monitor (blog), October 3, 2022, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20221003-israel-razes-palestinian-village-for-207th-time/.
5. Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 56.
6. Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 63.
7. Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime From Above (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 9.
8. Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 48; Eyal Weizman, “Ground Truth: Reading Aerial Images of the Naqab from the Ground Up,” Jerusalem Quarterly 81 (Spring 2020): 39, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1650012.
9. Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 48.
10. Sheikh, “Desert Bloom.”
11. Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 10.
12. Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 11.
13. Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline, 11.
14. Weizman, “Ground Truth,” 44.
15. Weizman, “Ground Truth,” 38-39.
16. Weizman, “Ground Truth,” 39.
17. Sheikh, “Desert Bloom.”
18. Weizman, “Ground Truth,” 38.
19. Weizman, “Ground Truth,” 39-40.
20. Weizman, “Ground Truth,” 40.
21. Weizman and Sheikh, 64.

This article is published in issue 41.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue