Asaf Amran · Dead Sea, Israel · Dead Sea · 2021–2026
A landscape disappearing as it is photographed.
Five years at the lowest place on Earth — from the air, from the land and from within the water. An exhibition, a film and a book.
For the first time in the Dead Sea, photographing an artistic landscape underwater.
For the first time in the Dead Sea, photographing an artistic landscape underwater.
About the projectThe project
The dying heart of the Dead Sea.
Death gives birth to beauty.
Beauty is not proof that everything is all right.
Dying Beauty began in 2021, when Asaf Amran returned to a salt formation he had photographed a year earlier and found that the place had changed completely. From that moment the camera was no longer only a tool for making a beautiful image — it became a means of testimony.
In his photographs Asaf intensifies the painful beauty of the Dead Sea — unusual angles, meticulous compositions, clean aesthetics — creating a reality even more spectacular than the one the eye is used to seeing. But the Dead Sea lives up to its name: it is dying. Much of what these works show no longer exists, has already changed, or will disappear within weeks or months.
That contradiction gave the project its name: a place at the height of its beauty, and at the same time dying. For the first year Asaf returned every week, sometimes twice — in every season, at every hour, from the air, from the land and from within the water.
2021
The project begins — weekly visits through 2022
~1 m
The sea level falls every year
34%
Salt — ten times the Mediterranean
First
Artistic landscape photography from inside the Dead Sea
Five dimensions
One sea, photographed in every way it can be seen.
From the field
-
Sunset over the salt cracks -
Salt pearls at the waterline -
Waves over the salt terraces at sunrise -
Salt icicles hanging over the shore -
The camera set up on the salt crust
The turning point
This is where it all began.
The same place, before and after. Two photographs that show in an instant why this record matters.
The book
This is not a photo album.
Five years of work on the project became an immersive art book about the Dead Sea — a personal visual story inviting reflection on beauty, loss and memory.
Keep me updatedLectures
Bring the Dead Sea to your audience.
Two visual lectures, about an hour each, in Hebrew and English — at companies and organisations, museums and galleries, schools and universities, photography communities and conferences.