 When I first heard about the project and the possibility of working in it, I was really conflicted. I love the idea and I really love the idea of working together with other photographers on a project such as this, but I really didn't want to go to Israel. I really didn't want to work in Israel. I had worked in several Arab countries and the idea of going to Israel just sort of left me cold. I think it wasn't really until after I started working that I really was interested in the idea of Israel and the sort of material reality of it. It was involved a number of cultures coming together and until I really saw that in images, I really didn't think there was anything for me to do there, but as soon as I started working that changed. So really since I was 18, I've been working with different communities in different places around the world with the idea that people from those communities not only can understand better than someone from the outside what are the most important things to photograph, but also they compose the pictures from that place. Their ideas of design, land, intimacy are all wrapped up in how they grew up and what they were surrounded with. So actually the compositions of the photographs I feel match the place in a way that I as an art school design photographer would never be able to do. So it's a long process of collaboration working with kids or with adults in this case like elderly women in East Jerusalem for me to see what they're seeing but also to give them the tools so that they can control how they're taking pictures, which fortunately with digital cameras is much easier than it used to be, but I really take it slowly with them so that they learn to look at an image very closely and to look through the camera very closely and to understand what a frame does, to understand what a moment does and that photography is a language that you need to understand how to operate or use the different parts of it like time and frame and viewpoint. So that when they're taking pictures they intuit the way to take a photograph in the same way that a photographer does, I mean with less training obviously, but I work with them over in this project I work with them anywhere from over I think maybe three months was the shortest to two years. So they really become photographers. I started out thinking that the place that I felt most comfortable was in the Arab-Israeli part of Israel because it was a place that I felt some connection with visually, culturally and I thought it also embodied the complexity of the dynamics of the country and I worked with kids in two schools, one in the village and one in Nazareth and immediately they started taking very interesting pictures, very colorful with lots of different elements like food and photographs and it was very lively and then after that was maybe I worked for three months and here was this body of work and I thought well where am I going to go from here? So rather than really get very involved in that one community I decided to go to the opposite spectrum and work with girls in a military school, orthodox girls in a military school and also found five girls to work with there who were very dedicated and took some amazing, very intimate pictures of their life together because of working with so many people and working with the ability of working in the digital realm we, the kids and I must have made, not just kids but must have made close to I don't know, somewhere between 50 and 100,000 pictures and of course it was hard to edit it down but on the other hand it was incredibly exciting to do that when I would work on one project like for example the Women from East Jerusalem and I would spend maybe a week looking at those pictures and I would do it fairly often, I would go back and forth in different projects it was like being inside the place, inside their heads and it was incredibly exciting to see the images and see what would come up and so it never felt like hard to edit except for maybe at the end to really get it down to about 30 or 35 pictures for each project that is in the exhibition but by then I realized that I wasn't going to be able to use all the good pictures and I didn't try to do it, I tried to do it as intuitively as I could from what I knew of the people that I had spent time with