About the project:

Grant Use Summary (by Kai Wiedenhöefer)
During a sunset in August 2005 I was standing in a hole next to the Neve Dekalim settlement in the Gaza Strip. I was digging out an exploded Qassam rocket that Palestinian militants had shot there from the neighbouring Khan Yunis Refugee Camp, when I received the call from Getty Images that I had received the Getty Editorial Grant. The rocket ended up as a decoration in the apartment of a friend of mine in Tel Aviv, the Getty Grant resulted in a book publication.

That time I was working on the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza, while also photographing on my book project about the wall in the occupied Palestinian territories. I had made already three trips to Israel each for a month working on the wall there. The first time in October 2003 a friend of mine from Switzerland Christian Schmidt virtually pulled me over there. In many phone calls, he convinced me to go there and photograph the building of the barrier. After publishing my book Perfect Peace on the Palestinians in 2002 I was more than reluctant to return there again, because I did not want to repeat my previous work. Another friend from university times offered me to lend me his 6x17cm panorama camera for this assignment. This finally gave me the push to go and work on the wall: If I went back there, I HAD to find a different photographic approach.

The panorama camera turned out to be the very tool for the subject. I really enjoyed using the bulky camera also working often from a tripod, something I had never done before. After this first trip I managed to get another assignment from the German magazine GEO to work on the wall again. I showed my publisher Gerd Steidl the results of the two trips, who decided that he would publish it as a book if I would pursue the topic.

The Getty Grant was a major financial help to bring this project to fruition. The grant was feeding the hungry mouth of the panorama camera with 220 roll films which made the project very expensive. It helped me also to return for another two trips each for a month and close the project in spring 2006. In 2007 Steidl published my book Wall. Altogether it was the project I enjoyed most in my life as a photographer so far and the Getty Grant played a mayor role in it.

As a result of this experience and also photographing the fall of wall in Berlin in 1989 (where I have been living since 2004) I am now photographing walls around the world as my next book project. After working on the American Mexican border and the peace lines in Belfast, I am writing these lines being on the ferry Juan J. Sister to the Spanish enclave of Melilla in Morocco, which is heavily fenced off against migrants from Africa.

*The above photo gallery is from the Mexico portion of Kai's ongoing project.