Gaston Zvi Ickowicz works primarily with video and photography, exploring the relationship between people and landscape within sociopolitical contexts. Deeply engaged with the Israeli environment, his practice reflects the tensions, histories, and layered meanings embedded in the land. For Ickowicz, the camera is a tool of precise observation, allowing him to approach complex realities with clarity and restraint.

A central concern in his work is the distinction between landscape and place. Through photography, he investigates how a seemingly static landscape can become an active, charged site shaped by memory, perception, and experience. Rather than documenting violent events directly, he focuses on their traces—burned fields, roadblocks, remnants of ancient settlements—using these marks to reflect on history, identity, and belonging. His journeys in search of images are also personal explorations of origin and connection, where the present is continually linked to deeper layers of the past.

In the months following October 7, Ickowicz repeatedly returned to the Gaza Envelope, where Nova partygoers fled as the sirens sounded at 6:29 a.m. With over 1,200 people killed and 251 abducted, many still held in Gaza, he chose to photograph the rising sun—the moment meant to crown a celebration, now irrevocably transformed into the beginning of terror. Field, the resulting project, is anchored in the exact time and place of the attack.

As part of his research, Ickowicz spoke with survivors of the Nova party, many of whom recalled the powerful presence of natural elements during those hours: the blinding sunlight, birdsong between gunfire, the shelter found behind leaves or inside a burrow. What was once a peaceful open landscape for collective joy became a site of intense, immediate, and embodied perception amid catastrophe.