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Artist photographer Leonid Padrul, born in the Ukraine in 1950, immigrated to Israel in 1994. From his early twenties he focused his interest in artistic photography, with a great passion for landscape and nature while climbing peaks of his country. His creation may be divided into two periods: The first (1978-1994), includes images taken in his country of origin; the second encompasses a vast body of works done in Israel since his immigration to the country. Both periods are characterized by a special interest in landscape from a personal point of view. Padrul's early works testify to the artist's capabilities – his photographs bear witness to his unique, yet universal, observation of nature. Having conquered mountain peaks, he conjures before our eyes the Dead Sea, a dazzling phenomenon of nature, which for the past decades has
been shriveling away, as if succumbing to death and demise. In his pastoral-like photographs of the Dead Sea, unfolding the age old secrets of creation, Padrul achieves the apex of his work, combining a poetry with a philosophical world view. This unique sea located in the lowest place on earth, once the Stradivarius of nature, whose life is waning, has become the target of Padrul's work since his immigration to Israel. He soon began to immortalize the sea, whose supply of fresh water from the Jordan River is dwindling, creating frightening devourers that may be likened to the Black Holes of the universe. These devourers are living testimony to the demise of the Dead Sea. Padrul's photographs immortalize the primeval beauty of the dying Sea. The light captured by his camera endows the works with a pastel-color-like quality and a soft diffusing light which collects the viewer into a dream-like reality, where, for a fleeting moment, the hurtful truth is forgotten. The spots from which he takes his photographs enable a rare opportunity to test the sea, its mysteries and the salt crystals morphing into beauty imbued designs. His camera captures Israeli landscape of yore, recalling primeval recumbent creatures in their place of crouching action-less, as if accepting their fate. Padrul's works has won boundary-crossing acknowledgment among experts and viewers alike. Between the years 1978-1990 he had several solo-shows in Kiev, Kharkov, Sebastopol and Archangelsk.