Steve Sabella grew up during the first Intifada (uprising) in Palestine and during the first Gulf War to realize quickly the multifaceted and complex life in Jerusalem. He resented the social pressure caused by all the religious denominations which strove to convert one's religious affiliation into a national one. To escape, Sabella constructs for himself a New World.

However, looking at some of his final images in this body of work, one notices that this new peaceful world starts to chatter apart with haunting images of loss and desolation. Using infrared photography, SEARCH, which relied on imagination for its execution, sets the ground for Sabella’s future investigation of constructing his own concepts of Imagined Cities (Jerusalem in Exile 2006), Identity (Mentalopia 2007) and Exilic Landscapes (Exit 2006). It is interesting to point out that in Search in 1997 he shies away from Identity to a constructed imagined world, where as in 2009 he comes down to earth to Settlement – Six Israelis & One Palestinian, a project where the artist confronts his identity in a thought provocative installation.