Notwithstanding the hype and controversy surrounding this image, the show itself was a critical success and signalled the rise to prominence of the person responsible for the photograph – Adi Nes.

For the more discerning viewer there were two odd things about that image. First, although naked from the waist up and acting like something of an arse (this Israeli term to denote delinquents fits well with the English equivalent), the mizrahi hunk was wearing a knitted skullcap – symbol of religious Zionism.The second issue was that he was not actually wearing Israeli army uniform, but US combat fatigues.

Whilst many Jews on the subway noticed the skullcap, they did not seem to notice the combats.A number of reviews at the time suggested that, in presenting such an icon as part of his Soldiers series, Nes was, to cite Grushkin again, ‘quashing the image of the idealistic Israeli pioneer’.While he may indeed have been offering a critique of Zionist ideology, not one review suggested that, by supplanting Israeli uniform with US fatigues, he was making a point about the influence of American jingoism on Israeli military culture. In an interview given some time later Nes explained his choice of uniform thus:

I dressed him in American uniform because he’s trying to act like a Hollywood soldier...He is very strong but his power is not real...It’s like a shadow of power (quoted by Richard Goldstein, Village Voice, 2-8 April 2003).

What is so gripping about the Soldiers series is its playfulness with realpolitik.America is the real locus of power. The naïve chauvinism of the Israeli army is but a poor replica. This may be why Nes portrays Israeli combat soldiers as part of a circus act, a touring big-top replete with acrobats, fire-eaters, trapeze artists and strong-men. Deep down, however, these pictures read like ‘an anthem for doomed youth’, the loss of all their years spent languishing in the army, waiting to be posted to the front line. To be sure, Nes’s own ambivalent feelings about military authority place him outside of accepted ideology. His Soldiers series portrays young men who live life on a knife-edge.They have very little care or concern for their own welfare and a recklessness and bravado that the language of psychoanalysis understands as a death-wish. The psychological realism pervading most of Nes’s works underlines his belief in the dionysiac attitude of ‘Drink today for tomorrow we die’. However, behind the macho attitudes Nes believes that there is a gnawing tiredness: a tiredness of war, a tiredness of hostilities and a tiredness of never-ending conflicts. Exhausted from another grinding military exercise:

the young men in his photographs betray a sense of vulnerability, loneliness and terrible tiredness...they find comfort, literally leaning against each other and bathing together (Judy Dempsey, ‘Seeing through the Image’, Financial Times, 11 December 2000).

Despite his deep-seated feelings on this issue, Nes maintains that the photograph appearing across the subways of New York was a non-aggressive parody of ‘muscular Judaism’. Interviewed several years later, he explained what he meant by the term:

there is an element of Zionism, which is given expression in literature and film that is taken from Greek mythology: eternal youth, the unblemished warrior, excellence in meeting challenges, self-sacrifice for the homeland (quoted by Dalia Karpel, ‘The only democracy’, Ha’aretz, 6 April 2001).

Not one to shun ‘excellence in meeting challenges’ himself, Nes has received prestigious prizes for his work in Israel from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the IcExcellence Foundation. In 2005 alone, he has shown at the JCC in Manhattan, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Martin–Gropius Bau, Berlin, and the National Gallery of Modern art, Rome. He is currently being shown by commercial galleries in New York and Paris.Many reviews have been eager to point to his mother’s occupation as a librarian, his ‘befriending’ of Greek mythology at a young age, his experimentation with the myths of Adonis, Narcissus, Sisyphus and the like. Coming from a traditional, observant Jewish home, Nes has not come out as a heretic and rejected Judaism’s promise of redemption through Yishuv Ha’aretz – inhabiting the land of Israel.Yet both his Soldiers and Boys series do point to the disillusionment of the younger generation with the mythical ideals of their Zionist forebears. In 2002, at the height of the Al-Aqsa intifada, he wryly noted the type of everyday occurrences that inform his experience of the Zionist ideal:

Two weeks ago, I was on the way to a coffee shop I always go to. Then I heard that it had exploded...death is foreshadowed in most of my pictures. Death lingers everywhere (Robert L. Pinchus,‘Mortal Vision’, San Diego Union Tribune, 6 May 2002).

Israelis live in a culture of uncertainty. In his most recent book, Home to Stay (New York: Three Rivers, 2001), Daniel Gordis describes how, after moving to Israel from Los Angeles, he finds his daughter Talia distracted and moody following reports of significant army casualties at Jenin. Her headmistress feels that Talia, with so many of her friends affected by the casualties, is grappling with feelings of inauthenticity: ‘She knows she won’t be fully Israeli until she is drawn inside the circle of death.’ There is no tragic irony in the way she says this. She does so matter-of-factly.

When not having to confront the sudden death of friends becomes an issue of status anxiety for a 16-yearold schoolgirl, Gordis, like Nes, knows that there is a profound schism between the promise of a tolerant and democratic culture in Israel on the one hand and the intrusion of militarism on the other.

Exploring uncertainty is absolutely pivotal to an understanding of Nes’s fascination with the themes of death and desire. Homoerotic celebration and homosexual tension dominate his mundane scenes as well as the Soldiers series.Teenage boys and young men are represented with luscious curls, vibrant skin tones, and muscular legs and buttocks; their gaze directly engages the (presumably male) viewer. A favourite image of mine, exploring the uncertainty and absurdity of tenderness and desire in battle, is ‘Untitled 1995’ from the Soldiers series. Writers in the Israeli press have already noted that it undoubtedly draws on a visual tradition of Christian Pietàs and Depositions. They overlook, however, the photograph’s obvious and more specific visual reference as a send-up of a famous painting completed some 400 years earlier in Rome: Caravaggio’s first full-length canvas, the ‘St Francis in Ecstasy’.

The ‘St Francis’ (c. 1596) represents his first mature response to the theme of Grace. One of its distinguishing features is that Francis, swooning in the arms of a seraph with his eyes closed, experiences an internal and private vision. By omitting specific reference to the divine vision and depicting the angel supporting Francis, both literally and figuratively, Caravaggio may have been using the deliberately ambiguous language of desire – the glow of light on the upper body of the angel and the passive, unconscious form of the saint – to show reason and the senses subordinated to the power of heedless love.

In Nes’s reading, the ‘wounds of love’ – the stigmata – are a conceit since at a second glance it is clear that the wounded soldier is an actor and that the wounds are cosmetic. The ‘angel’ paratrooper has parachuted in from the skies – with or without his comrade? – and now administers nail polish and face paint to his stricken brother in arms.

Nes’s ‘Untitled 1995’ is a picture of monumental sobriety and directness. It is also a subtle weaving of a socially transgressive trope (love between two men) with the machismo of the elite corps. Similarly, the rapture depicted in ‘The Ecstasy of St Francis’ is as much sexual as it is spiritual; the saint (to whom Caravaggio gave the features of his patron, the pleasure-loving Cardinal Del Monte) reclines in the arms of a nearly naked teenaged angel.

Nes conflates the paradigms of death and desire by encouraging the fetishization of his young men, just as Caravaggio does in his portrayal of raunchy prepubescent youths such as the controversial ‘Amore Victor’ (c. 1601). In Nes’s Boys series, the androgynous youths wear no disguise as to their intended purpose. With their soft mouths open in show of desire and in their suggestive state of dress and undress, they mean to tempt the spectator.

The indubitable relationship of Nes’s and Caravaggio’s lifestyle to their work is evident in the strong subjective element in their creative output. Both develop from themes relating to youth, in their early work, to a later concern with the omnipresence of death. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Nes’s portrayal of young men bear witness to the physical sacrifice that developed from an intense and often painful struggle with his sexuality in an all-male environment that institutionalized homophobia. In particular, he recounts his infatuation with a high-achieving student at his school. Some years later, Nes finds himself working as a flight supervisor on the Hazerim air base alongside the object of his love – now a bona fide combat pilot. His ardour is undiminished:

I said to myself, I want to photograph my beautiful pilot, the one I am in love with...and I asked him for his uniform. I took it home and wore it, with his smell, his sweat...I felt ecstatically happy (quoted in Billy Muskuna Lerman,‘The Hero’s Soft Spot’, Ma’ariv, 11 February 2000).

A development-town boy from a religious immigrant family, Nes cannot cast off the fragments of a conflicted past and is candid about his experiences:‘In Kiryat Gat,’ he is cited as saying in Lerman’s article, ‘to say “homo” was like saying transvestite, it was as bad as spitting.’ Yet Nes’s path towards self-knowledge, intense and painful though it may have been, has enabled him to communicate a unique moral vision for a beleaguered Israeli society. Like Sisyphus and the stone he carries for eternity, Nes’s struggle to find a place for each ‘atom’ of his stone adds deeper complexity and intricacy to the retelling of his story. Whilst Nes realizes that the story and its struggle are ongoing, he has embraced them in triumph. I imagine that he is happy.

Samuel Klein received an MA in History of Art from University College London following a degree in Theology from Cambridge. He is an independent art consultant and writer and a lecturer in visual culture and philosophy at the London Jewish Cultural Centre.

Adi Nes, ‘Untitled 1995’, from the Soldiers series