An artistic documentary book by Asaf Amran
A landscape disappearing
as it is photographed
Five years of work on the project became an immersive art book about the Dead Sea — a personal visual story inviting reflection on beauty, loss and memory.
This is not a photo album.
This 204-page book gives equal weight to photography and first-person writing. It brings together compelling art, stories from the field and precise scientific context, inviting a deeper reflection on beauty, loss, memory and our responsibility toward a disappearing landscape. Some of the places in the book have already changed or no longer exist as photographed — each image preserves a singular convergence of water, salt, light and time.
The turning point
This is where it all began
The same place, before and after. Two photographs that show in an instant why this record matters.
204
pages
2
editions — Hebrew and English
5
dimensions of photography
2021–2026
an ongoing project
The project
The dying heart of the Dead Sea
Dying Beauty began in 2021, when I returned to a salt formation I had photographed a year earlier and discovered that the place had changed completely. In that moment, the camera in my hands ceased to be only a tool for creating a beautiful image; it became a means of testimony.
During the first stage of the project I returned to the Dead Sea every week, sometimes twice a week, to create a body of work across four dimensions: the seasons; night, day, sunrise and sunset; stills, video and time-lapse; photography from the air, land and water. In 2025, a fifth dimension was added — macro photography.
The book creates a visual memory of a landscape and a period changing before our eyes — a singular document of artistic, historical and national value.
From the book
Scenes that cannot be recreated
The same sea, again and again — from the air, from the land, beneath the water and into the material itself.
At the heart of the project is a contradiction: the images are breathtaking, yet their beauty is born of retreat, dehydration and disintegration. The receding water reveals coves, crystals and new formations — and from the moment they appear, they too begin to die.
DEATH GIVES BIRTH TO BEAUTY.
Beauty is not proof that everything is all right.
A journey that became a book
The project keeps moving
- 2021The project is born from returning to a place that had changed
- 2022The Dying Beauty exhibition opens at ZOA Gallery
- 2023The film screens and is nominated at the Richmond International Film Festival
- 2025Macro photography is added as a fifth dimension
- 2026The book is completed in Hebrew and English
The first edition
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