There are more than one million notes placed in the cracks of Jerusalem’s Western Wall each year and one photographer has captured them in a way not seen previously.

Also known as the Wailing Wall, it is part of the ancient Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism. Ofir Barak’s project Chrysalis explores the powerfull pull of the wall.

Barak has captured other holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but between 2020 and 2023 he began to focus on the Western Wall.

To capture Chrysalis, Barak had to find a macro camera setup but found it difficult because of the Leica M10 Monocrhom rangefinder camera and the M-mount system it utilizes.

“Since macro photography was unfamiliar to me, I had to find the right equipment to help express my vision for this project,” Barak tells PetaPixel.

“I chose a macro 85mm lens from Laowa that can focus up to 0.163 cm (0.5 feet). After some testing, I learned that the minimum focus distance gave me the proximity distance I was looking for, yet it cast a shadow on the object since it was this close. I needed to address that, so I compensated and illuminated the scene with a ring light.”

The resulting photos are abstract shapes and textures, some of which barely look like notes at all — it is easy to see where he got the name Chrysalis from.

“The age of the notes on the Western Wall is unpredictable, ranging from a few hours to several months or even years,” explains Barak.

“However, due to the limited capacity of the wall to contain these notes, the spaces between the stones fill up every few months, causing some notes to eventually fall from the cracks.

“To address the issue of limited space, a decision was made to clear the notes from the wall twice a year before the Rosh Hashanah and Passover holidays.”

Barak says that these notes are “profound, personal, and meaningful” to the people who placed them there and they come from not just Jewish people, but people of all faiths.

“Bound up in the physical act of writing a private prayer or request on a small piece of paper, folding it up, and placing it into a crevice in the surviving remnant of the ancient Temple Mount is a deep spiritual intention between the worshiper and the hallowed place where they keenly feel God’s presence,” says Barak.

“There is no particular format or style for writing a note to be placed on the Western Wall. The notes and texts are silent prayers from the heart, expressing one’s most intimate thoughts and feelings. They can be a single word, a few words, or many.

“They can be written in any language on any kind of paper, on a scrap of paper ripped from a notebook, on a bus ticket, or even on paper currency. The practice has become widespread for Jews and non-Jews alike, and it is common to see people from all beliefs participating in this tradition.”

PetaPixel has previously featured Barak’s work: his documentation of Mea Shearim one of the oldest Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem outside of the Old City.

More of the photographer’s work can be found on his website and Instagram. Chrysalis is available as a book and can be purchased here.

Image credits: Photographs by Ofir Barak

Aaron McKenzie Fraser is an editorial/commercial photographer with over 20 years of specialising in location-based environmental portraits for national/international magazines and advertising clients based in Nova Scotia, Canada. Since moving to a rural community outside the city centre, he has been enchanted by the beauty and spookiness of the place he calls home. What started as a personal project has transformed into establishing a tourism centre and self-promotional campaign celebrating the haunting beauty that defines the region.

Sketch Harbour is a mystical and spooky photography series featuring landscapes, portraits, and still-life compositions. The collection is currently on display at the “Sketch Harbour Department of Tourism & Social Club,” housed within a 100+-year-old registered Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia fishing shack situated on the edge of the treacherous North Atlantic Ocean in Ketch / Sketch Harbour, Nova Scotia, Canada, which might as well be the middle of nowhere.

The exhibition, set against the backdrop of the historic shed, offers an immersive experience that transports visitors into the enigmatic world of Sketch Harbour. Aaron’s masterful use of light and shadow captures the essence of the harbour, revealing its ever-changing moods and mystical atmosphere.

In addition to the physical exhibition, the Sketch Harbour Department of Tourism invites global audiences to explore the collection online here. The virtual gallery offers an opportunity for art enthusiasts worldwide to experience the haunting beauty of Sketch Harbour from the comfort of their homes.

Showing a different view of the Maritimes than what you’ll see from glossy tourism campaigns, Aaron hopes to draw creatives from near and far. To attract them and help them remember their visit, we created a photo zine, postcards, t-shirts, toques, matchboxes, stickers, and necklace vials of harbour water.​​​

Kramerville, Sandton, South Africa

‘A group of Namji dolls in a shop called Amatuli. They are very good at grouping products together, and the result is a place that you can spend quite a while in just enjoying the visual treats.’

Photograph: Peter Austin/GuardianWitness

The Photography & Video Show is making its return to the NEC in Birmingham from Saturday March 16 to Tuesday March 19. 

And, to celebrate the biggest imaging event of the season returning to its traditional March slot, the Show is teaming up with Canon to give away an amazing camera package: a Canon EOS R6 Mark II with Canon RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS STM lens. A combination that’s worth £3,130!

Canon will be one of over 200 exhibitors currently announced for The Photography & Video Show, covering all aspects of imaging and image making. From mirrorless cameras and DSLRs to action cams and film cameras, lenses and lighting to bags and backdrops, image editing to video post-production and of course, the biggest buzzword of the moment: AI. All bases will be covered at the supershow! 

And that’s not all. There are hundreds of free talks, demonstrations, workshops and seminars, featuring some of the biggest and most exciting names in the industry. From Royal photographers to YouTube personalities, BBC journalists to brand ambassadors, there’s an amazing amount of knowledge, wisdom and anecdotes to soak up. 

You can find all the details on , and buy your tickets, over on the official website. 

And if you want to be in with a chance of winning that amazing Canon EOS R6 Mark II with RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 package worth £3,130, you can enter the competition via the link below! Full terms and conditions can be found on the competition page.

The Photography & Video Show is organized by Future Plc, which is the parent company of Digital Camera World. 

I first used a hydraulic platform to take photographs when working on my Playground series in 2011. I’d been trying to capture training sessions atthe facilities in the Netherlands where members of the fire brigade, police and Ministry of Defence are put through their paces. Initially I was balanced on a stepladder. But when I sent through some of the pictures, I was told they worked aesthetically but lacked a sense of where these ghost towns actually were – away from civilisation. To achieve that, I knew I was going to have to get higher.

As the camera I was using was bulky and expensive, I didn’t want to risk attaching it to a drone. Besides, drones attract attention. A cherry picker offered the perfect solution, allowing me to shoot securely from much greater heights. I’ve been using them for my high-perspective work ever since. Some of the people from the company I rent the equipment from now follow me on Instagram. They always get it squeaky clean for me, because they know I’m one of the few clients who will bring it back in the same condition.

This picture, taken 10 years ago, is part of my Park series. In the Netherlands, we’re quite cramped for space, meaning the parks in Amsterdam and Rotterdam are used pretty much as people’s back yards, gathering points for city-dwellers. Terrible things are going on in the world, but here is proof that within Amsterdam, a vibrant city full of people from all over the world, we can coexist peacefully next to each other.

I’d visit each park on my bike first, to work out my shooting position, check for solid ground for the crane, and work out where the sun was going to be throughout the day. The season, the weather conditions, everything had to be taken into account – it’s quite mathematical. When it comes to actually setting up, I don’t get permission first. In the Netherlands, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness afterwards than to ask for a permit beforehand. I would just turn up with the cherrypicker wearing an orange vest and a white helmet – I’ve found the brighter you dress, the less visible you are. If people do ask questions, I usually say: “I’m making a 3D scan.” It’s a boring answer that helps deflect attention.

This is Westerpark. What you can’t see is that there’s a huge festival going on behind the fence to the left, which made it even easier to work without anyone bothering me. Because the landscape, for me, is as important as the people in it, I always try to make sure the people are equally divided around the frame, to balance the image. Once I did ask a family: “Would you mind going a little bit over there?” But then they constantly looked at my camera, so that’s not something I do any more.

As a kid, I was dragged to museums and galleries by my parents, which I’m now very grateful to them for. The way 17th-century Dutch masters painted light ended up influencing my work. Sometimes, on a cloudy day, I’ll wait an hour and a half for a beam of light to burst through, as if the sun is painting on the landscape. When everything comes together, it’s like one symphony orchestra, with all the elements working together.

I become very focused and will wait as long as it takes. When I was shooting Playground, I’d sometimes be working in the snow. People from the army would be calling up: “Please come down. You’ve been up there for nearly five hours, you must be freezing.” The height I shoot at depends on the subject. For the Park series I wanted to give a sense of what people were doing, so I worked between 10 and 15 metres up. In some instances, I’m 20 metres up, because I want the figures to show the scale of the landscape. Above 15 metres, I can barely hear people below. It feels like I can reach out and grab birds flying by. I move around in an “in between” layer, a kind of a divine perspective. It can get lonely, though. I always say: “When I start talking to myself, I have to go home.”

This image is part of Human.Kind, a group exhibition at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva until 14 April, in collaboration with Prix Pictet.

Jeroen Hofman’s CV

Born: 1976, Brabant, the Netherlands.
Trained: The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, graduated in 2002.
Influences: Edward Burtynsky, Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky.
High point: “My first big solo exhibition in The Hague’s Photography Museum in 2022.”
Low point: “I am a fanatical snowboarder and got stuck in a glacial crevasse in Austria. The mountain rescue service got me out.”
Top tip: “This advice from Nadav Kander back in 2013: ‘Never try to be someone else.’”