Fifteen years of street photography — made between 2011 and 2026 — culminate in Jerusalemites, Sharon Gabay's new book that shifts attention away from Jerusalem's monumental stones and toward the people who live among them. The volume runs to 304 pages, appears in Hebrew, English and Arabic in a single edition, and arrives alongside an exhibition of the same name that premiered at the Jerusalem House of Quality in May 2026.

Where Jerusalem is most often photographed through the Western Wall, its towers and its enclosing walls, Gabay builds his project on gestures, encounters and everyday rhythms. His earlier books, as he notes in his artist statement, were accompanied by images of an eternal, monumental Jerusalem. Here his declared intention is to move from symbols to the city's living fabric — from myth to reality.

Who is Sharon Gabay?

Gabay was born in Jerusalem and belongs to a family whose roots in the city stretch back several generations. That biography is not incidental to the work. His photography draws on lived knowledge: the rhythm of the streets, recurring patterns, gradual transformations. This continuity lets him observe both those who pass through the city and those who remain.

Photographing Jerusalem means working in a space shaped by religions, identities, political tensions and social divides. Gabay acknowledges this complexity as part of the conditions of his practice rather than as a problem to resolve. Within it, he looks for everyday moments that do not necessarily claim to represent a community or explain the city as a whole.

One scene in his artist statement condenses the approach. At the same gate of the Old City, two nuns, a woman in a hijab with her children and a baby stroller, and an ultra-Orthodox man gather. They share the moment — and the smell of the same bagel. Gabay's attention rests on that tangible proximity, on the shared experience of simply being in a place.

What does the camera actually do here?

In the artist's words, the camera functions as an instrument of observation. Its purpose is to record incidental moments in which beauty and pain can coexist. Gabay describes the result as "a Jerusalem without makeup, a city of flesh and blood." That phrase anchors the project's direction: toward the human experience of the city and the details that become visible only when the photographer pauses to look.

The book is also the product of sustained labor. Gabay speaks of thousands of hours spent walking, observing and waiting. The publication emerges from that accumulation of time and encounters, with the stated aim of creating a human archive of a city that changes while preserving its continuities. The duration is central: fifteen years allow scenes from different moments to sit together within one volume, so that urban life appears as an experience of presences, recurrences and transformations.

The artist calls his work deeply local while seeking to speak in a broader language. The book is about Jerusalem, but equally about a person living in a city — how they occupy space, encounter others and take part in street life. That dimension connects the specificity of the place to an experience recognizable well beyond its boundaries.

How does the exhibition structure the work?

The exhibition format explains how Gabay brings his photographs into conversation. The selection comprises thirty-three images arranged into twenty-one works: twelve pairs and nine individual photographs. It mixes color and black-and-white imagery, portraiture and street photography.

Within the pairs, photographs taken separately are placed side by side to establish a dialogue. According to the exhibition proposal, they depict communities that share the city but rarely share a frame. The relationship exists only once the images are brought together; viewers observe similarities and differences and form their own interpretations.

This structure poses a quiet question: what do communities share that ordinarily goes unnoticed? Juxtaposition makes those relationships visible, while the nine individual photographs retain their autonomy within the whole. The arrangement is specific to the exhibition, accompanying the book's visual world and expanding the ways the work can be presented — the continuity of the pages on one hand, the dialogue between photographs on the wall on the other.

Why three languages in one edition?

The trilingual format — Hebrew, English and Arabic in a single volume — is part of the book's approach to reaching different readers, and it mirrors the attention to Jerusalem's human diversity that runs through the photographs themselves. The choice is a formal one, but it aligns with the project's core claim: that the city is best understood through its inhabitants rather than its monuments.

Jerusalemites gathers an extended chapter of Gabay's relationship with his native city. The work asks viewers to observe Jerusalem through the people who animate it, and to recognize — within ordinary encounters — a human fabric that takes time and attention to become visible. With the book published and the exhibition format now established following its May 2026 premiere at the Jerusalem House of Quality, the project points toward continued circulation in both forms, each offering a distinct route into the same fifteen-year body of work.