アメリカ人フォトグラファー、ウェンディ・エワルド（Wendy Ewald）は40年間にわたって世界中を旅し、現地のコミュニティ、特に子供と交流し仕事を続けている。またそれに加え、自身の作品作りに関しても簡素なカメラを人々に手渡し、プロの写真家が主題とするテーマを市井の人々の視点で撮影するという方法を発展させてきた。現地の人が現地のコミュニティの様子を自分たちの目と手で作ったイメージは、コミュニティ内で生活した者でなければ見えない風景や人々の表情を映し出している。本書はパレスチナ自治区が直面している複雑さを12名の世界的写真家達の目を通して検証するプロジェクト「This Place」への参加から制作され、ユダヤ人、キリスト教、ジプシーやドゥルーズ派など数々の人々を撮影している。

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’