Wendy Ewald: This Is Where I Live

For forty years, Wendy Ewald has travelled the world working with local communities, especially children. In addition to making her own photographs, she developed a method of handing out simple cameras and encouraging people – ordinarily the ‘subjects’ of a professional photographer – to author their own images of themselves and their communities. Because the photographers are trusted observers, innocent of the techniques (and wiles) of professionals, the results have the uncanny feel of unadorned truth. 

In This Is Where I Live, Ewald redefines the scope of books about Israel and the West Bank. Ewald portrays an entire region through its discreet parts. Her subjects are contested sites where many communities coexist: Jewish, Christian, Gypsy and Druze. Ewald worked with fourteen different communities – in neighbourhoods, villages and schools – using a version of the prismatic approach she’s refined over many years. She encouraged a wide range of people – school children, elderly women and hi-tech workers – to take pictures and document their lives from their own perspective.

Cameras were offered to children uprooted by settlements in Hebron, the West Bank; to young girls at Tzahali military academy; to stall owners at The Shuk, Jerusalem’s lively marketplace; and to Bedouin students at a school in the Negev Desert. The collected images, accompanied by interviews and statements by the photographers, evoke the vitality of the region’s cultural landscape, including small minorities such as the Gypsies (who are often swept under the umbrella of Arab identity) – not to mention the myriad identities within majority groups, illuminating the manifold meaning of ‘Jewish identity’.