Kai Wiedenhofer: Wall

“Over a nine meter wall you cannot shake hands,” says a Palestinian pensioner who lives in the shadow of Israel’s growing Separation Barrier. Kai Wiedenhöfer, who documented the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and has been photographing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for more than a decade, has spent the last few years documenting inhabitants of the Occupied Palestinian Territories who find themselves in the path of the barrier. He has also documented the growing barrier itself, a 650 kilometer mix of walls, fences, ditches and earth mounds, which serves as a border between Israel and a projected future Palestinian entity. Working in color and black-and-white with a 6x17 cm panoramic camera, Wiedenhöfer has produced depictions of the wall—and life in its lengthening shadow—that make it hard not to share his view, informed by a life in Berlin, that separation barriers do not offer real solutions to political conflict.