At a glass factory in Israel, mountains of broken bottles become art under photographer Oded Balilty’s creative eye.
“It’s very difficult to find new things in your own backyard.”
So says Israeli photographer Oded Balilty, who lives in Tel Aviv and works for the Associated Press.
A few years ago, Balilty was on assignment in Yeruham, Israel, photographing a factory that produced concrete bricks for the barrier between Israel and Palestine. While he was shooting, something across the street caught his eye—mountains of colourful, sparkling, broken glass rising up from the lot behind a glass-bottle factory.
Balilty snuck in through the back, took one picture, and left. But the memory stayed with him. In all his years of photographing in Israel, he had never seen anything like it.
When he had a week off two years later, he went back to the factory to explore. “I said, ‘OK, well, the gate is open,’ so I entered without asking anyone,” he recalls. “And I started to take pictures, and I worked there for, like, two hours.”
Read the full article by Melody Rowell at National Geographic.