In The Patriarch’s Wardrobe, Nick Waplington photographs a landfill south of Hebron, in the land once called Palestine. The site receives waste from Jewish settlements in the Judea region of the West Bank; before burial, Palestinian children search through it for anything of value, working in groups under adult “handlers.” Waplington agreed to photograph from a distance so that their identities would not be disclosed. The resulting images hold the scene at an ethical and formal remove, refusing the easy intimacy of documentary portraiture while keeping attention on labour, dispossession, and the material residue of a contested landscape.

The photographs are presented alongside paintings made by Waplington in response to the same West Bank terrain. Each painting corresponds to a portion of the disputed land and carries a title combining Hebrew and Arabic place names. Its colours derive from those caught in the photographs on location, then reworked in the studio. This structure makes the book more than a sequence of reportage images: the landfill and the landscape are brought into a sustained exchange between observation and interpretation, photographic record and painted abstraction, immediate evidence and later reflection.

Published by PAM Book in 2012, the English-language hardcover comprises 56 pages. Its compact scale and deliberately paired forms give the project a concentrated editorial presence. For collectors, the book merits attention as a clearly defined body of work in which Waplington’s photographic practice is inseparable from a second, materially different response to place. The Hebrew–Arabic titles and the transformation of observed colour into painting add a linguistic and conceptual layer, making the volume especially pertinent to collections concerned with photography’s relationship to politics, geography, and artistic collaboration across media.