The Western Wall, Jerusalem.
In ancient Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall. I found myself at the center of one of their most important ceremonies: the Bar Mitza. Corresponds to Catholic First Communion, all 13 year old boys do. And the Wall was packed with people, believing Jews, practitioners and Orthodox. And being there among them was unsettling, I felt in a dimension that I would never have imagined, a dimension far from my culture, far away, but spiritually so touching as to leave my mark. I took no less than 300 photos, spent more than an hour immersed in their prayers, their tears, reading the Torah. And no one was in the least annoyed or disturbed by my intrusiveness, by my brazen curiosity, each of them continued in his prayer, in his ceremony without taking care of the rest. But there are not only images saved on a memory card, I have those carved in my memory that no editing software can modify, they remain there, indelible to mix with a thousand and a thousand others forever. •
Alessandro Riccardo Tedesco, Italy, Agrigento
