Wendy Ewald has spent more than forty years handing cameras to people who usually appear inside someone else’s frame. Her first such project, in 1969, was with Innu and Mi’kmaq children in Canada; Kentucky and other places followed. This is Where I Live takes that practice, refined over decades, and applies it to a region rather than a single school or town.

The book was made with fourteen communities in Israel and the West Bank: children uprooted by settlements in Hebron, girls at the Tzahali military academy, stallholders in Jerusalem’s Shuk, Bedouin students at a school in the Negev, among others. Jewish, Christian, Druze and Roma participants all appear. Ewald conceived and directed the project; the photographs come from the people she invited to make them, and the book carries their interviews and statements alongside the images.

Structure is the argument here. Published by MACK in 2015 as a 400-page hardcover with around 600 colour plates, it assembles a large picture of a contested place out of small, particular ones — the prismatic method Ewald has described. Because the photographers are not professionals, the images read as plain first-hand description rather than reportage, and the region emerges as lived-in detail. Minorities such as the Roma, often folded into broader categories, and the many strands of identity within a majority group, both get room.

For a collector, the interest lies in scale and in credit. The book declines to give one author’s account of a heavily photographed territory and instead records many hands and many addresses, with the participants’ own words as part of the evidence. It also belongs to a long line of Ewald’s collaborative publications, from Portraits and Dreams (1985) to Towards a Promised Land (2007), and to MACK’s list. Its subject is intractable and its method unusually generous; that combination is what holds up.