“This is where I live”
‘This Place’ explores the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, as place and metaphor, through the eyes of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers. Their highly individualized works combine to create not a single, monolithic vision, but rather a diverse and fragmented portrait, alive to all the rifts and paradoxes of this important and much contested space.
The project follows in the tradition of such projects as the Mission Héliographique in nineteenth-century France and the Farm Security Administration in the United States, which gathered artists who use photography to ask essential questions about culture, society and the inner lives of individuals. Initiated by photographer Frederic Brenner, the completed project consists of a traveling exhibition, companion publications and a program of live events.
Wendy Ewald was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1951. She has spent more than 40 years collaborating with children, families, and teachers all over the world.
In her work, she encourages her collaborators to use cameras (as well as using the camera herself) to record themselves, their families and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams. Ewald often has them mark or write on her own negatives, thereby challenging the concept of who actually makes an image.
She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of American Art, the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland among others and participated in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Her many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
‘With time I’ve learned to back off from the world’, writes Wendy Ewald, ‘and let it reveal itself to me by giving cameras to my subjects to photograph’… These communities eventually produced tens of thousands of images, along with writings and local exhibitions. Her book, This Is Where I Live, combines photographs made by the projects’ participants, their testimonies and Ewald’s portraits and extensive research.
Involving her subjects in her projects is not unusual of photographer Wendy Ewald’s work. Staying true to this characteristic, when participating in the ‘This Place’ project, Ewald chose to distribute cameras to a number of young children living throughout the region. By doing so, she was able to visually capture the true culture present in the towns they live in, highlighting the importance of the photographs themselves rather than the person who took them. Ewald invested her time with these children and reviewed skills ranging from, the fundamentals of using a camera to the basics of the art of photography. She assigned them with different tasks and in between each session reviewed their photographs with them. After receiving their initial photos, Ewald assisted them by commenting on technique and engaging in dialogue, ultimately working together to reach a product.
“Ewald worked with members of fourteen different communities including West Bank children, vendors at a Jerusalem marketplace and Bedouins in the Negev Desert.”- ABC News
Beginning as a project involving children from two communities, “This Is Where I Live” soon expanded to include people of all ages from 14 different communities in the area allowing her to map the country from an inside perspective. Over the course of two year, Ewald made numerous visits to Israel and the West Bank, taking testimonies in order to provide an adequate narrative for the photos being taken. By doing so, she was able to provide the world with the standpoint that although this region is divided, to say the least, the divergent population has managed to coexist in their own complex ways.
“Very early on, I came to believe that because local people, especially children, know their own lives more intimately than any photographer from the outside possibly could, they often make pictures of uncanny openness and depth.”- Wendy Ewald
After giving these various communities the unique opportunity to participate in such a project, Ewald brought things full circle by inviting some of the children to come to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Not only was this the first time in Tel Aviv for many of these kids, but they were also coming to see their own photographs exhibited in an internationally recognized art museum.
Watch the kids reactions when they were confronted with the photographs they took.
Find these projects and the rest of Wendy Ewald’s collaboration in her just published book, This Is Where I Live.
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