A coffee table book chronicling windows and doors in old neighbourhoods of Jerusalem with an accompanying history of each neighbourhood
About the project
Like pickles in a jar I wanted to preserve the old Jerusalem. On my visits home over a number of years I wandered through some of my favourite neighbourhoods, through the streets and alleyways I played in as a child documenting Jerusalem's many facades. Windows in particular ignited memories of my boyhood but also inadvertently connected me to the people that resided there decades before. It was almost as if gazing at the windows drew me back in time to all that they may have seen, myself included.
The book is broken down into neighbourhoods that were established outside the old city walls. Each section describes some history of that neighbourhood and the characteristics that make it unique, together with a carefully curated selection of images captured over a number of years. This book has been a labor of love for me - and I now realise what a privilege it was to have grown up in such a city as Jerusalem with so much history and aesthetic beauty surrounding me.
About me
I was born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel. The street where I grew up was unpaved during my early childhood years and my friends and I loved to play in the surrounding hills which were largely undeveloped. We loved to take old shutters from windows and use them like toboggans to slide down the steep hills. At the time and also being a kid, I had no idea of the ways in which my small city would morph and change with the passage of time. I studied film and on concluding my studies I focussed on editing. There was something magical about being able to weave people's stories together for the screen. In 2004 I moved to Melbourne, Australia to satisfy an itch for faraway places and experiences. With distance from my hometown came a newfound appreciation for what was back then, the mundane. The streets and alleyways of my childhood had a new ethereal feel to them. The facades that I once walked by without a second thought were now drawing me in - to their history, to their beauty and to the stories of the people who lived there. The subtle changes that I barely paid attention to when I lived there were now becoming very apparent; new buildings were going up everywhere, old shops in the Shuk (market) where I used to shop with my parents were being replaced with hip and trendy new cafes and eateries, roads and parks were being reconstructed. With the newfound lens of being a tourist in my own city and with my city fast changing right in front of me, I began to take my camera out with me to capture some of Jerusalem's facades and this is how Window to Jerusalem was born.
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Designed like a wander through the streets of Jerusalem, the book is a hard cover lavish 152 pages long printed on high quality paper.
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