This series of images is an attempt to put into practice the theories that surround the the act of representation.
The majority of the images in the book were taken in a period between the 20. July and the 3rd of August. One week before, on the 14th July, three Palestinian gunman shot dead two Isreali police man in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Israel responded with heightened restrictions for muslim visitors to the mosque which ultimately led to some of the strongest clashes in recent times between Palestinian protestors and the Israeli army. I travelled from Tel Aviv to Ramallah on the 21st July and the traveling from Jerusalem to Ramallah via the check-point in Qualandia made the tension feelable on a very personal level. During my stay in the West-Bank the heightened tension was omnipresent and I considered a few times to include images of protest in the edited version of the book but consciously decided against it.
During the process of photographing the book two key texts were highly influential. Butlers writing on precariousness and the thought that the perception of a situation immediately influences our policies towards it (Butler, 2016, p. 29) made imminent the urgency of every image that finds its way out of the occupied territories. Saids 'Orientalism' felt ever-present during my stay and while dealing with the situation of the Palestinian people. Both had a strong impact on my though process on the visual representation of the place both while photographing and during the editing process of the series.