“Over a nine meter wall you cannot shake hands,” said a Palestinian pensioner who lives in the shadow of the Separation Barrier currently being built by Israel.
Since October 2003, photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer, who has been documenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for more than a decade, has been meeting with inhabitants of the Occupied Palestinian Territories living in the path of the barrier. Every six months, he returned to the territories to document the construction of the 650 kilometers of walls, fences, ditches and earth mounds, which form the border between the State of Israel and a future Palestinian entity.
This time, he has chosen to portray the conflict with a 6 x 17 cm panoramic camera, producing a series of color and black and white photographs which depict the wall and fragments of life in its shadow.
In 1989, the Berlin-based photographer documented the fall of the wall in his own city. Recent German history has convinced Wiedenhöfer that separation barriers offer no solutions to political conflict.