Sometimes a place does not affect the course of a man’s life, which would be the same in every place. Other times a city, a country or a border can represent a boulder on a person’s existence or thousands. This is the case of two countries whose history is mutually linked, indeed fused, Israel and Palestine. 

The delicate political situation that influences the life of these two states is now part of our everyday life. It is one of those situations that everyone knows, but few know the real causes. The conflict between Israel and Palestine simply exists. 

Intrigued by the latter, the French photographer Clément Chapillon left these countries for the first time in 2010 and, while discovering a different scenario from the one he had learned from the news, he was experiencing the fieldwork for the first time, savoring its beauty and uniqueness. For this very reason, a few years later, Clément returned to Israel and Palestine, this time to devote himself more deeply to a photographic project. 

This is how Promise me a Land was born, his photographic series that offers a new and original vision of these places, where, at the center of artistic research, there is not the political situation and tensions, but the close bond between people and the land in which they live, regardless of their creed and nationality. 

Promise me a Land becomes a document that shows the signs, the scratches that years of history have inflicted on the landscape and on people’s faces.