Foto Friday – Yuval Nadel
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Religion
The world of haredi observant Jews is one that most secular Israelis never get a chance to see – and if they do, they find it alien, even threatening. Photographer Yuval Nadel, an Israeli-born Jew with a secular up-bringing, became familiar with and learned to appreciate and respect the people who lead a religious lifestyle.
In a collection of photographs called “Custom, Prayer and Ceremony – The Jews of the Land of Israel”, he documents that meeting between secular and religious without trying to explain the lifestyle or Jewish customs. “As a photographer, it was important for me to show the religious experiences of Israeli Jews from my personal point of view,” he says.
The photographs presented in Nadel’s book were taken over four cycles of holidays and intermittent days between 2004 and 2008. Nadel writes that his journey began at the annual festive Lag B’Omer commemoration at Mount Meron. “I was captivated. Over the next four years, I traveled around the country to the various outposts and locations where Jews perform their mitzvot (commandments), ceremonies and prayers… I arrived to these places as a photographer, as a bystander observer and yet as someone participating in the experience. It was so, because that’s how I was received…”
While most such books “fall prey to the sin of anthropology… based, at worst, on patronizing voyeurism and at best, on intellectual curiosity,” writes Israeli journalist Kobi Arieli, an observant Jew, “Yuval Nadel’s approach arises out of a positive attitude that is nurtured and grows with each image… This book is a story about love and light, which is why it is both good and enjoyable.”
For his part, Nadel says, “If these photographs can contribute even slightly to help unite Jews through exposing a beautiful side of the world of observant Jews in Israel, I will have reaped my reward.”
Foto Friday – Behind the lens with Israel Press
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Life, War
If a news photographer does the job right, they will render themselves anonymous. Viewers will focus on the image itself and forget that there was someone who created that image. But there are people behind the lens, often a phalanx of them, roasting in the hot sun in hopes of spotting Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bar Refaeli or any other visiting or local celebrity; standing around for hours while police drag the Yarkon river at a crime scene; or, as they have for the second week in a row, laying their lives on the line on the Israel-Gaza border.
Getting the shot, however, involves a great deal of hanging out, watching and waiting, and shutterbugs might click off a few shots of their own to stave off the boredom. Often, the subject is the person standing next to them.
Photo credit: Koko
Tomeriko, photo editor and staff photographer at Yediot Aharonot, is also the founder of a Israel Press, a Flickr page where Israeli news photographers upload the pictures they take of one another. Taken as a whole, the pictures document a tiny brotherhood – including a few sisters – of people who know each other very well.
Photo credit: Koko
“I started it because I had a lot of pictures of photographers from all sorts of events and didn’t know what to do with them,” explains Tomeriko. “At first, I thought I would send the pictures individually but I also wanted other people to see them. So I started the Flickr page and uploaded about 1000 pictures. When the other photographers heard about it, they started to send pictures to me. It’s kind of a family album.”
Photo credit: Koko
“It came from boredom,” laughs photographer Gilad Kavalerchik. “If you look at the beginning of the album, you’ll see a lot of pictures from football games and so on. But it’s become a way of having a souvenir of an event.”
Right now is not at all boring and Kavalerchik is running between jobs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the front, where he managed to snap a few such mementos.
Photo credit: Gilad Kavalerchik
Photo credit: Gilad Kavalerchik
Tomeriko emphasizes that Israel Press is a non-commercial enterprise, and isn’t intended for people to promote themselves or their news organization. He is very careful, however to credit each image, and provide contact information. He’s also divided Israel Press into disciplines – news, sports, camera-persons, reporters and of couse, the celebrity press. (The t-shirt in this photo says “Caution- Paparazzi before you”).
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Some of the photos are exercises in photographic composition.
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Sometimes, they are opportunities to try out in-camera effects, as in this picture of veteran photographers Koko and Moshe Shai, at the starting line of the Tel Aviv night run this past summer.
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Others document the camaraderie of a particular event – like the DiCaprio-Refaeli paparazzi stakeout – where photographers camped out for days. “This is our work. This is our shared experience,” says Koko.
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Photo credit: Tomeriko
Israel Press is a closed group with membership limited to Israeli photographers both here and abroad. Says Tomeriko: “You have to register to comment. Of course, people are interested in the behind-the-scenes of the media and we want people to see the pictures, but it’s really for us.”
Since the war started, Tomeriko has added some new photos of what the front is like behind the camera. “We’ve gotten some e-mails from people who want to give us encouragement, which is very nice. I posted them on the site.”
Foto Friday – Local Testimony
One of the troubling things about photography, especially at times like these, is that a picture is worth a thousand words – and not always the right ones. Israel’s military operation against Gaza is only entering its seventh day, and already, hundreds of thousands of images have flooded the web, the papers, the airwaves. Some are powerful, others are weak. Some are informative, others deceptive. Some are strong enough to make a statement on their own, others serve to illustrate text. And so many seem besides the point right now — but it may be too early to tell.
Sometimes, even in a networked world of instant communications and citizen journalists, a bit of time is needed before passing judgment on what makes a good news photo. And so, each year, concurrent with the international World Press Photo exhibition, Israel hosts its own photojournalism competition, called Local Testimony. The pictures chosen capture moments with both a media value and a human significance, and is also a retrospective on the events of the past year as reflected in its main categories: news, culture and art, nature and environment, portraits, daily life and sports.
The winning photo is by AP photographer Muhammed Muheisen was taken at the village of Bil’in in June 2008. It shows a Palestinian youth running to avoid tear gas grenades that were fired to disperse a demonstration against the separation barrier.
The winning photo series, Homeless, is by independent photographer Felix Lupa, who documented the lives of two homeless people living in an abandoned car in Tel-Aviv: blind foreign worker Boris, aged 54, and his self-appointed caretaker Genady, aged 70.
The winning photo in the sports category was taken by Dudi Vaaknin, a staff photographer at Ynet and Israel Hayom. It’s a picture of Beitar Jerusalem soccer player Yoav Ziv, and is pretty self-explanatory.
Up until last week, going by the topics covered in the exhibit, Israel was preoccupied with domestic politics, a stalemated security situation, social welfare issues and a hefty amount of navel-gazing. Now, it’s the war. There’s no telling what images will come to represent this new year when it ends. What’s for certain is that Israel is a fantastic canvas for photojournalists and that Local Testimony 2009 will continue to present the best of the best.
Local Testimony is on at the Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv until January 11, after which it moves up to the Open Museum at Tel Hai until mid-February. The full exhibition can be viewed here as well.
Foto Friday – Israel Thai Style
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, Foto Friday, General, Life
Asaf Friedman is a professional photographer who, for the past two years, has been documenting the lives of Thai guest workers in Israel. The project is now a powerful exhibit, entitled “Israel Thai Style.”
Friedman trained his lens on the workers’ private lives and, in particular, how they spend their leisure time. Theirs is an invisible community that most Israelis not only never see, but don’t even know exists — though it literally touches the lives of Israelis every day through the fruits and vegetables put on the table.
“I always see them at the town squares as they wait for their employers to pick them up, riding their bikes in the middle of the road, caring for the unfortunate, working in agriculture and construction, and doing the work that not one aside from them is willing to do. When a troop of Thai workers crossed the field across from my house to pick potatoes for several months; that was the first time I really saw them. Questions began to arise – who are these ‘foreign workers’? What other identities do they have, aside from that of a laborer? What do they do when they go ‘home’? What do their lives look like and to what extent does their foreignness characterize them?”
To answer his questions, Freidman got to know some Thai workers who brought him into their private sphere. In gaining access to the caravan neighborhoods scattered throughout the country, Friedman was amazed to discover a world that, without his knowing it, had existed right under his nose.
“My interest is to document, through the camera lens, a collection of rituals and situations from the everyday private live of the Thai migrant workers in order to expose the cultural and social capital they bring with them. Although the exhibit doesn’t directly or explicitly relate to the fundamental significances of the presence of migrant workers in Israel, it could open a small window through which we might think about, reflect on and discuss them.”
Freidman looked at the seamy side of celebration as well, including cock-fighting, pig slaugtering, gambling, and amateur beauty contests for both genders. “Cock-fights in an enlightened country like Israel seems very brutal and in fact goes against a lot of conventions in a progressive society. It’s important for me to emphasize that this is a very popular sport in Southeast Asia, and Thailand specifically.”
Although not overtly political, Freidman does intend for his work to be a statement. “Israel’s migrant workers represent a component, albeit a transparent one, within Israeli society. The significance of the migrant workers presence affects not only the structure and organization of the labor market in Israel, but also exposes other basic aspects of social and political life in Israel.”
“Israel Thai Style,” is on till December 30 at the Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv and can also be accessed online at Friedman’s website.
Foto Friday – Tel Aviv Port
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Travel
Conde Nast’s Concierge.com just named Tel Aviv tops on its “It List 2009” and about time too. Each year, Concierge “comb[s] the globe looking for the emerging places that will be on everybody’s lips two years from now”. So how great is it to already be in a place “that will make you feel all right about the world again”. Great indeed.
Photographer Hanoch Grizitzky has captured the Tel Aviv’s enchantment and energy in a series of images of the old port and its new boardwalk in the rain. The image above is of the walkway and, looming in the background, the Reading Power Plant — a historic Modernist building whose tower was once accurately described by an old boyfriend as “the phallus of Tel Aviv”. Reading is now garishly draped in colored lights because we are the party city.
Winter isn’t the most fashionable time to travel, but it has its advantages: the city air feels fresh, there aren’t a lot of tourists, and people are calmer, (relatively speaking – this is Israel, of course), in the absence of the summer swelter. The disadvantages are that it sometimes rains and gets dark very early, but these elements have their charms as well.
Grizitzky freelances for leading Israeli news publications such as Yediot Aharonot, Globes, women’s mag La-Isha, entertainment rag Pnai Plus and others, photographing objects of beauty – be they desert flowers or spokesmodels. “My starting point is love of photography and beautiful things come from there,” he says. “Like the hummus commercial says, ‘Do it out of love or don’t do it at all.’”
These small format images don’t begin to do justice to Grizitzky’s works, particularly this panoramic view. For a better look, visit his website and picture gallery.
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