Ten years ago, I arrived at the artillery military camp of "Shivta" in the Negev Desert. I was sent there to serve as an army photographer. My job was to document ceremonies and shooting drills. At the beginning of my service, I was treated as a "rookie" — unwritten rules applied to me: I was subjected to verbal and physical harassment, exhausting kitchen duties, humiliation, and harsh treatment from both soldiers and commanders. Lies became part of my routine in a militant environment with miserable living conditions.

In an attempt to push back against the reality I was living in, I began bringing to the base the analog camera my uncle had given me for my 13th birthday. Looking back now, years later, through a deep dive into my archive, I understand that the camera was a way to cope with a daily routine I couldn’t bear — simply being a soldier. I didn’t take many photos during my three years of service, but looking back, I see that each one I did take contained an entire world for me. After years of writing and focusing on my memories, I’ve come to realize, through my photographs, how much I was humiliated, harassed, betrayed, and left alone. My images from the military camp serve as concrete testimony to a time that felt eternal.

When I photographed, the loneliness that ate me from the inside was transformed into light burned into film. The camera was like a boat in the heart of the desert.I wonder — how many people in the world are trapped in oppressive systems, tools in the hands of powerful and complex structures, locked in depression, lost in fragmented identities, in compulsive religion, in poverty, in captivity, under military occupation. How lucky I was to be able to photograph. Absurdly, my role in the army led me to what I wanted to become — a photographer. What I was forced to shoot — propaganda — sparked in me a deep resistance that helped me discover the true meaning of photography for me: self-expression.