"An architect by training, Erekat began taking pictures, she says, "to escape architecture and architecture school." In 2002, she got permission to enter Gaza unexpectedly. She had just two rolls of film with her, one color, one black-and-white. But on the strength of those pictures, she won a grant from the University of California at Berkeley to continue her work.

In 2003, she traveled to Palestine to take the pictures that were to become the series "Borders Crossing Bodies."

"I wanted to capture daily life," she says. "What you hear on the news is who gets killed, but you don't see the daily realities, how people live.""

- Excerpt from 'Representing Palestine: Forms of Closure, Documentary Traces, and the Art of Breaking through the Barriers' by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
The Wall and the Checkpoints, exhibition catalog published by Darat al Funun - The Khalid Shoman Foundation, 2006