Gay Israeli photographer Adi Nes will deliver the keynote address at URI’s annual LGBTQ Symposium. Now in his fifties, Nes first came to prominence two decades ago with a series of photographs eroticizing the Israeli army (or at least eroticizing its soldiers, young men required by law to perform military service). Nes later cast the homeless as Old Testament figures, while a series on Palestinian prisoners first appeared in the pages of Men’s Vogue. Annoyingly, Nes’s potentially powerful photographs are so deeply grounded in art history, Greek mythology and religion that they’re usually divorced from any sense of urgency or deeper meaning.
(image: Adi Nes, Untitled (The Last Supper Before Going Out to Battle), 1999)