This series of images was taken over a period of two years in the Palestinian Territories and Israel. Like a lot of people raised in the Bible Belt, the “Holy Land” held a lot of mystique for me, mostly because of my time spent in the church, surrounded by biblical imagery and stories. The storybook images we looked at during Vacation Bible School every summer and in Sunday school every week were particularly vivid. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time reading the Bible, and as I imagined these characters living in a world two thousand years before me, they were not entirely dissimilar to the characters in a storybook: muted, pastel, and dreamy.

In my 30s, there was a two-year period when I was traveling back and forth between Bethlehem in the Palestinian Territories — where I was covering the news for mostly leftist, activist publications, trying and failing to make a documentary about youth imprisonment, and sporadically working as a bat mitzvah photographer for NYC families who had traveled to Israel — and Brooklyn, New York. The majority of my time was spent in the occupied Palestinian Territories, and as an artist and storyteller, it was often an overwhelming and heartbreaking place. But those feelings were always intermingled with my childlike wonder of the place.

Some of you reading this may also know of the more complicated issues at stake here; American Christian evangelical communities that don’t support Palestinians’ right not to live under military occupation or not to have more parcels of their land confiscated and settled, for instance. But most of this series is just about my own personal reckoning with the “Holy Land,” and seeing my magical childhood place in its current state.