 I didn't initially change my mind, but I agreed to go on the exploratory tour. I felt it didn't do any harm to actually go and have a look and kind of have a look at the situation there myself and see if actually being there on the ground kind of energised me and made me feel like I wanted to make work there. I was thinking about maybe reconnecting with my biological father who was, or is, Jewish. That was a reason in a way to consider going. The fact that it was a group project made no difference to me and my work at all. Towards the end of my time, Jessica Delcher and Malcolm Coller were there and I did meet with them both a couple of times. I didn't actually think about it in terms of a group project. My work is very unilateral. I'm very much a kind of a loner work-wise. I'm not someone who is involved with groups. I don't belong to any kind of camera clubs like Magnum or anything like that. I'm just a sole operator, you know, and that's how I work. I decided to work in the settlements because I've always been interested in the notion of otherness and also the place that people fit within the kind of socio-economic hierarchy of any society. The settlers were both white European but were living in the West Bank amongst the Palestinians. They were outsiders to Israeli society as well as Palestinian society. There's also within the notion of settlers that they do within themselves know that they are a kind of a group who are running against current thinking on a local level and a global level. Obviously they have a certain amount of support within certain groups within Israel, but not everyone. I've only ever seen them in a kind of very documentary way, in a kind of sensationalistic photojournalist taking pictures of settlements being torn down or settlers fighting with Palestinians cutting down olive trees. I wanted to see if I could contextualise them in a different way within a kind of wider notion of humanity and of being within the actual place in the physical landscape of the West Bank. With the photographs of the families, I have a history of photographing families. It's certainly something that's really interested me throughout my time working as an artist. It's a kind of a theme throughout art history that is a kind of bedrock of many different types of my work. I always try and have a kind of humanistic approach to the family group. I always kind of try to find the good in people and I wanted to bring those notions to this work. I wanted the work to strip away the politics and just look at the families themselves and hope that by doing that I would find a larger truth within the imagery. Undrawn aid the landscape and be to the people by the beauty of both of them and the kind of fractionalised living. If you are living somewhere where there is a kind of continual threat as it were to your everyday life then people live life to the full and there is a kind of sense of community and I felt that there not just with the Jewish communities but also with the Palestinians especially with the Bedouin because I'm mixed with all three groups of people while I was there. It is a beautiful place and it is a great being there. I feel really good when I'm there and I do like being there. I don't know if that would always be the case but certainly I kind of felt very at home there and unable to return. My editing process when I came to edit the work I made thousands of photographs and I made other work as well beyond photographs, sculptures and paintings. When I came to edit the work I took a year or so editing slowly on the wall of my studio and I thought I had it nailed down and then I fell off my skateboard and broke my leg and I had eight weeks lying there with my leg in the air. At that point I looked through everything again in a way that I hadn't done before because I had nothing else to do and I re-edited the work. At that last moment, that last two months before everything, I re-edited the work and I found different images and different pictures and it would have been a very different work if I hadn't broken my leg. Not that I advocate breaking your leg to edit but it certainly enabled me to focus and create the sequence of pictures that are this book and I feel that for me it is an important piece of work. It is a moment and a time and it does encapsulate what I intended to do which was kind of be about the settlements and be about the West Bank and be about the people but somehow have that as a kind of separate thing away from the conflict because I think that they have to be viewed in the landscapes as something about but different from the actual conflict itself. These pictures are about the land and the people. I hope that in the future this work will have some kind of lasting significance. It will do for me anyway.