Adi Nes, an Artist and Outsider, and 'The Village' Adi Nes is an outsider. He is a Sephardic Jewish gay artist. He is an outsider in Israel, a country that was forged by a people who, during two millenniums of diaspora, were outsiders. Mr. Nes remembers his mother singing to him when he was a child growing up in the Israeli development city Kiryat Gat. Often, the lyrics told idealized tales of the pioneers of modern day Israel. Even at an early age, it was clear to Mr. Nes that he and his family did not match this ideal. His parents were Sephardic Jews who had emigrated from Iran. He grew up among many darker-skinned children who looked different than the Ashkenazi Jews, of Eastern-European descent, that dominated popular culture. "When Israel was established, pioneers wanted to create an image of a man that is very different than the weak Jew from the diaspora," he said. The kids that lived in the villages that surrounded Kiryat Gat fit the idea of what was Zionist. As he grew up, he searched for a place to belong. But as a gay man, he always felt a little like a stranger in a mainstream Israeli culture that he saw as promoting the ideal of the macho Israeli settler or soldier. "It's a position that I will always be stuck in, first of all because I'm a photographer and a photographer will always be outside," Mr. Nes said. But it comes from my childhood: if you are growing up as the outsider, you will always keep this position in life. The only place where I am not an outsider is in my own family, with my partner and four children. Mr. Nes, 47, has explored issues of Israeli identity and masculinity in his photographic work by creating visual tableaux that are often influenced by art history and philosophy. He takes ordinary Israelis, and the occasional actor, and poses them as if he were both cinematographer and screenwriter. His most recent project, "The Village" is on display at the Jack Shainman Gallery through July 28. With "The Village," he returns to the vision of Israel that his mother sang about. But beneath the surface, this version is no longer so ideal. The village, he says, is like a dream that is bigger and better than life but also has "a layer of fears and horrors and things that are bad." "The country started with a dream, and then more and more, we decided to ignore the dreams," he said. I'm trying to bring myself back to the dream without forgetting the reality. There is an overlay of Greek tragedy in Mr. Nes's village. There is a specific routine in every Greek tragedy. Someone is doing something in his life, repeats the sin of pride, of hubris, then he's punished and he suffers. And the moment he suffers, this is the moment that he's changed, or the viewer of the tragedy is changed.  Mr. Nes's most famous image, "The Last Supper Before Going Out to Battle" (Slide 13) from his "Soldier" series, shows young male soldiers arrayed along a table as if they were in Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper." In 2007, a print sold at auction for $264,000. The soldier series came out of his time in the Israeli army. He was a "fragile and sensitive child in the periphery," who finally became part of a society when he entered the army. "I felt like I was married together to the men that served with me," he said. A later experience as a reserve duty guard in a Palestinian detention house made him feel a lot less comfortable and left him disillusioned. It also led to the series "The Prisoners" (Slides 19 and 20). As a guard, he befriended one of the prisoners and realized that there was no way he would shoot his friend if he tried to escape. During a deep recession in Israel, in 2002, Mr. Nes started a series in which he recreated biblical scenes using homeless people. When he began "Biblical Stories," he had recently ended a long-term relationship and was in the midst of a midlife crisis. He questioned whether he should continue to live and work in Israel. By now, Mr. Nes was successful enough as an artist to have a career in New York or Paris. But he realized that he couldn't move because so much of his art dealt with Israeli identity. "I can't just take pictures outside of Israel when this is my main subject," he said. When he looked around him, he noticed that Israel, too, was "having a very deep identity crisis." He wondered why Israeli Jews choose to stay. Was it ethnicity? Religion? A connection to the land or an obligation to each other? He used the Bible as a sort of spinal cord of Israeli society, creating contemporary representations of Abraham and Isaac, Cain and Abel, Ruth and Naomi, and Job. After 20 years of creating these fictional visual narratives, Mr. Nes has come to the conclusion that all the strands of his existence form his art - and all the layers that exist in his art - exist inside of him. After all, he is a Sephardic gay man who grew up in a development town, as well as a photographer and artist. He is an outsider. And an Israeli - which is sometimes difficult for him to define. "It's really hard to tell what is Israeli because there's not one voice that covers everything," Mr. Nes said. If you are looking from the inside, you will see a different thing than you will see from the outside. If you are looking from a political point of view, from the tension between the Palestinians and Israelis, you will find one answer. If you look from the historical point of view, or the Holocaust point of view, from Europe or the U.S., you'll find different answers. "The Village" is on display at Jack Shainman Gallery through July 28 and Galérie Praz-Delavallade in Paris through July 21.