Foto Friday – Israel in 3D
Filed under: Art, design, Entertainment, Foto Friday, Picture of the Week, Technology, Travel
We’ve written before about 19th century stereoscopic images of the Holy Land. The 20th century version was the ViewMaster (more on that another day) and the anaglyph, popularly known as 3D vision.
Anaglyph images provide a stereoscopic effect when viewed through glasses with two different colored lenses. The technology is enjoying a 21st century comeback due to Photoshop and other programs that allow people to easily create anaglyph images and post them online. So, get your red and cyan spectacles on! It’s time to view the sights and sounds of the Holy Land in three dimensions!
There’s been a resurgence in anaglyph movies as well. Production company Highlight Films provides a range of services to facilitate and manage TV, film and video productions, including researchers, production fixers, camera crews, HD cameras and equipment, location scouting, personnel and, of course, 3D film and video. Enjoy.
3D HD landscapes of Israel
3D Dead Sea 7 Wonders
3D Jerusalem
Nostalgia Sunday – Riding the waves
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, education, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, Social Justice, Sports, Travel, War
Israel’s Lee Korzits won the gold medal this past weekend at the Sailing World Championships in Perth, Australia. Her achievement, along with Gal Fridman’s Olympic gold medal and Shahar Zubari’s bronze, is remarkable on its own. Even more so, given how new pro surfing is to our young country. And, like most things Israeli, it started with a dream.
Before surfboards arrived on our shores, there was the hasakeh, a sort of platform on which lifeguards would stand and paddle. Used from at least the 1930s onwards, there are several theories as to how this banana-shaped wood vessel came into being: one that it was used by Arab fishermen, another that it was based on a 1926 design by legendary surfer Tom Blake.
Its use by the Israeli Navy was immortalized in song in 1972.
Hasakeh
Riding the waves on a hasakeh, however, was not surfing. According to an online essay about the History of Surfing in Israel, that began with Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, an American surfer and physician visited Israel in 1956. Wikipedia states that he volunteered for the Israeli army during the Suez Canal crisis but was rejected. Nonetheless, during his year-long stay, he found happiness on the beaches of Tel Aviv where he conceived of a dream: to found the first Olympic surfing team from the young state of Israel. Paskowitz imported six long-boards imprinted with the Israeli flag and began scouting the beach for potential talent and for someone to manage the project.
“…he arrived on Frishman Beach, [where] he found a lifeguard named Shamai Kancepolsky, also known as Topsea, and presented the idea to him. Says [Topsea's son] Nir Almog, ‘There was an immediate chemistry between them and my father decided to take on the project.’
‘At that time, lifeguards caught waves using hasakehs alone. Dorian gave them lessons and slowly, the lifeguard booth gang began surfing. In those days, [before breakers were built] Israel had high waves that broke on the shore itself… and going into the sea to surf was considered an act of bravery bordering on insanity…”
“A few years passed and the gang gained experience… but there was still no Israeli representation abroad. Dorian [Paskowitz] returned a second time, bringing a load of surfboards with him that were distributed among the new members.”
“Nir Almog adds, ‘In the Sixties, a huge storm damaged the storeroom where the surfboards were stored, and broke some of them to bits. After that, my dad decided to restore one of the big ones and shortened it to 1.80 meters. I was the only one in Israel with a shortboard.”
“In the early Seventies, a paratrooper commander by the name of Yair told Topsea that the army used a material — a aerated plastic called polyurethane foam — made by a company in Haifa. The material was similar to that used to make surfboards. Yair raised the possibility of manufacturing surfboards made of this material… Topsea and Nir began trying to design surfboards… and began a small surfboards producing industry. Most were rented out, and so a new generation entered into surfing…”
Topsea managed a small workshop on Hilton Beach and, along with renting out Hasakehs, designed surfboards. He, his wife Naomi — Israel’s first female surfer — and their children, all became lifelong surfers.In 1977, son Nir founded Almog Surfboards, Israel’s first pro surfboard company. Topsea co-founded the Israel Surfing Association in 1986.
The sport has continued to grow in popularity; according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing, “Israel is home to about 15 surf shops and 10,000 surfers”.
Paskowitz, by the way, gave up practicing medicine to become a professional surfer. He and his family founded and run Surf Camps and are known as The First Family of Surfing. In August 2007, he founded Surfing 4 Peace together with his son David (along with Israeli surfer Arthur Rashovan and eight-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater) to deliver surfboards to the surfing community in Gaza.
A wonderful online photo archive, can be found at the Topsea Israel Surfing Center website. Topsea’s youngest son Orian runs the center, carrying on the tradition and legacy of his father. The Center also hosts a YouTube channel where there are more videos about the legendary Shamai “Topsea” Kancepolsky and the history of surfing in Israel.
Foto Friday – Ilan Garibi comes to light
Filed under: Art, coexistence, design, education, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Profiles, Religion, Travel
Yotze la-Or is a new exhibition of modern-day origami paper lanterns at Holon’s Hankin Gallery (December 19 to January 28). The name is a play on words — “yotze la-or” means both “coming to light” and “published”* — and also fits nicely with the upcoming Hanukkah holiday which, like most winter celebrations, has light as an underlying theme.
Using a unique origami technique known as Tesselation, artist Ilan Garibi creates lighting fixtures made of Japanese paper and red mahogany. Tessellation refers to a collection of figures fill a plane with no gaps or overlaps. In origami tessellations, pleats are used to connect elements together in a repeating fashion.
Garibi, a retired Israeli Defense Forces officer, was first introduced to the Japanese art of paper-folding at age 12 by a family friend but it was in 1996, while on assignment in Asia, that he took on origami as his hobby. In an interview with All Things Paper, Garibi related that while in the IDF, he would motivate his soldiers to get up early with the promise of origami lessons.
“Those lessons were always full… soldiers liked the idea of having a break from the serious business, to have their commander taking down his uniform shirt and teach the crane or a Ninja star.”
About five years ago, he began creating his own individual designs — mostly complex geometric patterns — that attracted attention and led to several exhibitions. Today, with 170 unique designs to his credit, he teaches “Origametria” a technique pioneered by Miri Golan and Paul Jackson of the Israel Origami Center, that uses origami to teach geometry in high schools. He also writes for the British Origami Society magazine, The Fold, (the online magazine of OrigamiUSA), and has authored a book on the subject.
See more pictures of Ilan Garibi’s work on his Flickr page. For more about Origametria, view this short film from 2006, which shows some of the IOC’s activities, including their peace program, Folding Together.
* Referring to the ancient practice of publishing on paper, kids.
Nostalgia Sunday – A Good Old Fashioned Aliya Campaign
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, design, education, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Religion, Social Justice
The latest flippity flap to get everyone’s knickers in a bunch — including mine (ouch) — was The Jewish Channel’s report of the so-called “semi-covert” ad campaign on billboards, YouTube and The Israeli Channel. (I am at a loss to explain how use of these publicly available platforms makes a campaign in any way covert, semi- demi- or otherwise).
The campaign is targeted at Israelis living in the US with the aim of guilting them into going home. As the daughter of one such mixed marriage — sabra Israeli mother, nice Jewish-American boy father — I can say with surety that the ads were absolutely on-message, that is to say, my sisters and I witnessed in real-life, all of the scenarios depicted in the videos.
The American-Jewish reaction, as everyone Jewishly or Israeli-ly involved now knows, was to take umbrage, with an emphasis on the second syllable. Since the ads were not targeted towards American Jews, the extreme reaction — among other things, accusing the Ministry of negative stereotyping, “luring expats” and “scare tactics” — is interesting.
More to the point, the target audience — Israelis living abroad — found the ads an insult to their intelligence. This may be so. No professional ad agency has yet come forth to take credit for the campaign so maybe it was indeed devised solely by thumb-twiddling bureaucrats tootling up and down the Ministry’s corridors. What I do find amazing is that this Ministry — so ineffectual at drumming up North American aliya that the job was handed over in part to outfits like Nefesh b’Nefesh — decided to do anything at all.
As to whether or not the campaign would have served to get the expats a-packing, I cannot say and we will never find out because it was pulled — by no less than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — although at this moment it still exists on the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption’s website. FYI.
Anyway… it’s time to take a deep breath and look back on the images that put forth positive messages, ones which made us truly, madly, deeply want to come to Israel, to make aliya*. This was one of my favorites:
Here, the Ministry tries to be hip… with Hippies!
Now THIS is messaging!
Even then, companies like Rolnik Publishers often did a better job of conveying the aliya message than the Ministry itself. Who can forget these iconic images?
All the preceding, with the exception of the Rolnik images, come from the Palestine Poster Project Archives, an online collection of posters published by 1) International artists and agencies; 2) Zionist and Israeli artists and agencies; 3) Palestinian nationalist artists and agencies; 4) Arab and Muslim artists and agencies.
* Aliya and aliya alone. In those days yordim were shunned, reviled and condemned for desertion, instead of courted with pricey ad campaigns linked to websites with boatloads of benefits for returning residents. When my mother, an Israel Consulate employee in the early 1950s, announced her engagement, there was serious discussion as to whether she would be able to retain her Israeli citizenship.
Foto Friday – Beyond Realistic Representation: Constantiner Photography Award
Filed under: Art, design, education, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, News, Picture of the Week
Two photographers were named winners of the 2011 Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist. Both Ilit Azoulay and Liat Elbling, writes curator Nili Goren, “represent a significant trend prevalent recently in Israeli photography, centering on a renewed discussion of seeing, remembering and documenting, through the use of processing, simulating and assembling—originating in direct photography but removed from it, thus creating paradoxical environments.”
Elbling’s work combines photography and computer digital processing. “I photograph raw material, then deconstruct and re-organize it on the computer,” she writes. “The process is comprised of several stages and operates in layers, while keeping the logic of the photographic order intact.
Untitled Photo by Liat Elbling
“The main themes in my work relate to photography as a representation of reality and to the relationship between photography and memory. I am fascinated by the manner in which photography is considered reliable testimony and used to mediate reality.”
(A) Part #50888970 Photo by Liat Elbling
“My work focuses on uncovering scenes and images that posses day-to-day familiarity but at the same time, it’s seems like they have been exaggerated or have lost the ability to function.”
Azoulay, who received her MFA from the Bezalel Art Academy last year, stated, “I start with an attempt to create a place and only then to document it in a photograph; to detach objects from their usual adjectives, to annul the common familiar meaning they hold and rearrange them into a different and coherent reality.”
A space for a man with a chair Photo by Ilit Azoulay
About Azoulay’s work, Goren writes: “Like an archaeological study that sorts and catalogues findings from the past, she collects remnants of the present and applies onto them a clear regularity of gaze and photographic conditions, and assembles a continuous pictorial sequence devoid of thematic meaning.”
Room #8, 2011 (detail) Photo by Ilit Azoulay
“The space achieved in the final photograph subverts the spatial logic of sensual vision, its photographic representation and their (the gaze’s as well as the photograph’s) interpretation through the human brain, i.e. with consciousness tools.”
Tunnel Photo by Ilit Azoulay
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art – Leon and Michaela Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist was founded in 1999. Award recipients include Pesi Girsch (1999); Dalia Amotz, Simcha Shirman, Ori Gersht (2000); Barry Frydlender, Hanna Sahar (2001); Lee Yanor, Galia Gur-Zeev (2002); Adi Nes (2003); Reli Avrahami (2004); Leora Laor, Igael Shemtov, Pavel Wolberg (2005); Roi Kuper (2006); Michal Chelbin (2007); Yanai Toister (2008); Naomi Leshem (2009). In addition to the Prize, the photographers’ works are entered into the Museum collection.
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