Outside #7

Rovner's Outside #7 is from a series of photographs that focuses on a single, apparently abandoned Bedouin house in Israel's Negev Desert-an emotionally resonant sign of human habitation in an otherwise inhospitable environment. Transformed by Rovner in a progression of steps from a Polaroid snapshot to a re-photographed, manipulated color print, the house is alternately solid and spectral, pulsing with life or dry and vacant, grounded, moving, quaking, or floating. Although in this photograph the home appears to be uninhabited, patterns in the windswept sand make the land seem tilled, as though it were being prepared for agricultural use. Rovner photographed this house intermittently for two years and observed the effects of the harsh desert climate. Eventually, the home disappeared, proving too fragile a human construction to withstand natural forces of decay.