 When Frederick invited me to participate in this project, I think I had a mixed reaction. One was fascination and the other was trepidation. One of the aspects of this, of this being a group project that I found interesting, was that knowing that there were 11 other photographers working, it freed me to really pursue my own interests and not feel as though I needed to do something encyclopedic to try to cover every aspect which wouldn't be possible anyway. So knowing that there would be other voices, I could just pursue my own interests. One of the ways I tried to deal with the complexity of the situation in Israel and the West Bank was to really do three different projects at once. One with a large format camera, mostly landscape. One with a digital camera, which was mostly scenes from everyday life. And one with large format black and white, which related to a series I had done in Israel in the mid-90s of archaeological digs. And by having these different voices going on at the same time, that this would in some way communicate the different voices that exist there. The work of mine in this exhibition is just my large format landscape work, landscape and architectural work. And it in some ways relates to landscape work I had done in the American West. And in some ways is different because the difference comes in that I became interested in how the land was built apart, how hilltops were claimed by settlements, by Arab villages, how the land was occupied by Bedouins. So this was the land that's contested that I find personally beautiful. I just have an attraction to the desert. But the contesting of the land is in subtle ways visible on the land. When I photograph, I like to take a block of time and work every day, all day long. And the work I did in Israel in the West Bank was six trips over a period of two years. Most of the time I had one assistant. And it was fascinating because he knew the country so well. I felt like he knew every single road. And we developed a very close relationship. If I'm spending a month going out all day long for, say, nine hours in a car every day, we do a lot of talking and became very good friends. And I began to rely on his really precise knowledge of the country. As I said, I go out and photograph all day long. And if I go out every day for a month or two months, or in this case, almost six months, photographing, I produce a lot of pictures, as I'm sure everyone in the show has done. The show could only have a handful of them. And it needed to have a very unified selection. And in this case, just a small group of landscape work. But as with most of the photographers in the show, there's a much larger body of work that couldn't be tapped in a group show. And for me, the way to mine that work is in the form of a book. One of the aesthetic problems that I had to encounter was, I see a place with fresh eyes, with almost the eyes of a tourist, but not take pictures that are tourist pictures. But at the same time, take pictures that could only be made in this place. In an attempt to avoid tourist pictures, I could see someone taking pictures that were, in fact, generic, that could be done anywhere. But I didn't want that either. I wanted something that was true to the place, that had some of the essence of a place that can be approached with fresh eyes. And so this became, for me, one of the central aesthetic problems. How to decide what to photograph.