Foto Friday – Behind the Urban Outfitters Scene
Filed under: Art, Blogging, Business, design, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, Pop Culture, Travel
A few weeks ago, Jessica reported that Urban Outfitters had come to Israel for a catalogue shoot. Urban Outfitters has since posted a sneak peek on Facebook at their Early Spring line, which includes some gorgeous shots of some equally gorgeous people making our drab winter surroundings that much brighter.
Along with the fashion shots, there are also some interesting artistic ones as well. That’s because three of the models — Coco Young, Marcel Castenmiller and Jonas Kesseler — are also photographers in their own right. Urban Outfitters who, despite their retro aesthetic, are ever on the cutting edge, asked the trio to document their Israel experience with a Behind the Scenes look.
The result: “Their photos reveal the little unexpected moments that make a trip special – snacks, late nights and the people that you meet for a second but will remember forever.”
The full exhibition is posted on the Urban Outfitters blog, along with interviews with the artists. Coco Young said that the Dead Sea was one of the trip’s highlights.
Photo by Coco Young
She also kept an eye out for unusual fashion statements.
Photo by Coco Young
The Dead Sea was also a highlight for Marcel Castenmiller but his favorite part of the day, he said, was “Getting back to the hotel room and staying up late with Coco and Jonas drinking wine.”
Photo by Marcel Castenmiller
And the absurd little details of a country where a kitchen clock gets tied to a street lamp — for heaven knows what reason — didn’t escape his notice.
Photo by Marcel Castenmiller
Jonas Kesseler said the funniest moment of his trip was arriving at the airport only to be strip-searched on his way into Israel. Glad to hear he kept a sense of humor about it. Certainly, that wit is reflected in his work.
Photos by Jonas Kesseler
Kesseler’s website, by the way, features a photo and drawing essay about his “wandering the endless streets of Tokyo”. Here’s hoping that a new edition — the lighter side of coming hard up against the finite borders of our little country, perhaps? — will turn up in the near future. As for Urban Outfitters, a radio commentator put it best today when he said, “Next time you come, please could you bring a branch of your store with you, too?”
Foto Friday – Celebrating Ethiopian Ledet with Matanya Tausig
Filed under: Art, coexistence, design, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, News, Profiles, Religion, Travel
Freelance photographer Matanya Tausig has always been fascinated by religion and religious subjects. For his final project at Jerusalem’s Hadassah College, Tausig chose to document the priests from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
The Ethiopian Church has two centers in Jerusalem: the historic Deir es-Sultan on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Debre Gannet constructed in the 19th century on Ethiopia Street. On one hand, both locations are only a short walk from the college; on the other hand, they are worlds away.
The resulting series went on to win second prize in the Local Testimony exhibition of regional photojournalism, (which runs concurrently with the annual World Press Photo exhibition).
The series is part of a larger project of documenting religions and religious ceremonies all around the Holy Land. “I generally work on things that take a long time; they percolate for years,” he says.
So, for example, last night Tausig was in Bethlehem, continuing work on his ongoing project by documenting the Orthodox Church’s Ledet (Christmas) midnight mass.
Ledet falls on January 7 in the Gregorian calendar (which is December 29 in the Ethiopian calendar). It comes after 43 days of daytime fasting known as Tsome Gahad (Advent), with a and is celebrated with processions, the mass service and a breakfast meal of traditional Ethiopian fare: cooked meat and vegetables served on injera (flat, spongy buckwheat bread), and washed down with tella (beer) or tej (a sort of weak mead).
In two weeks, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church will celebrate its most important festival of the year, Timket (Epiphany; also Timkat), a three-day festival commemorating Jesus’ baptism by Saint John in the Jordan River. Again, there will be processions and feasting.
Tausig maintains contact with his subjects and is planning future projects with them as well. Meanwhile, there are more photos to enjoy of the Ethiopian Orthodox priests on the Local Testimony site. And Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has more information about the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem.
Foto Friday – Dan Haimovich gets Hip(stamatic)
Filed under: Art, Blogging, Food, Foto Friday, General, Life, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel
Professional photographer Dan Haimovich left the field several years ago and returned recently to find something completely different. Over the past decade, photography had changed radically by going 100% digital and — thanks to mobile devices and the Internet — becoming part of everyday conversation.
Working with the Hipstamatic app for iPhone, which enables users to take pictures that look like those taken by the analog plastic cameras of the past, Haimovich captures small slices of life in Tel Aviv.
“The app reminded me of the age of film. Under certain lighting conditions it works exactly right and it unleashed something in me — a creative force that I haven’t experienced in a long time. ”
One feature of Hipstamatic , in mimicking its analog predecessor, is to create a slight disparity between what is seen through the viewfinder and the resulting “through the lens” image. It’s a retro touch that Haimovich enjoys. “What’s fascinating is that you have to approximate the frame so things come into it that are unplanned, unexpected.”
Haimovich has been posting the new works on his blog and on Facebook, often with short descriptions about how a particular series came into being. “With with these [Hipstamatic] works I found the ability to connect text to images. I give them short titles that are very intuitive and immediate. I find this combination works very well. Plus, you get feedback which is very nice. It’s very interesting to see what works and what doesn’t.”
Another project since returning to the medium is food photography. He most recently completed shooting a vegetarian cookbook with his sister Miki Haimovich, one of Israel’s premier newswomen (who last week announced she will be stepping down from her position co-anchoring the Channel 10 nightly news to pursue other projects).
To honor these and all other new beginnings, we’ll close with a new broom and wish all Israelity readers the very best for 2011!
Foto Friday – Local Testimony 2010
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, coexistence, design, education, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, News, Picture of the Week, Politics, Pop Culture, Travel, War
Local Testimony, the country’s largest and most prestigious annual exhibition of international and Israeli press photography, opened this month at the Eretz Israel Museum.
Photo: Mohammed Muheisen, Daily Life category
The exhibit presents images from the past year of war and peace, politics and society, culture and art, nature and the environment, sports, portraiture, multimedia presentations and more.
Photo: Shlomi Nissim, Nature category
The exhibit also includes a special focus on the work of its curator, photographer Galia Gur-Zeev, who notes, “As the curator of Local Testimony 2010, I regard this as a chance to compare this year’s photos with those of previous years that deal with the same topic.”
Photo: Rina Castelnovo, Politics category
“Press photos always appear together with a mediating text which imposes meaning and interpretation that are not free of manipulation. Separating a photo from the text enables freedom from verbal linearity and a transition to the photograph’s timelessness.”
Photo: Amir Cohen, Daily Life category
“Now, the documentary photo is open to new observation, new interpretation, and the suspension of our gaze.”
Photo: Moti Milrod, Portrait category
Local Testimony runs through January 15, 2011, and is open till 10:00pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Foto Friday – Kobi Israel’s Fragments of Life
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, coexistence, Foto Friday, General, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Social Justice, Travel
Photographer Kobi Israel uses the medium of photography to explore his experience of growing up gay in the macho Israeli society of the mid-70s and early 80s.
Israel was born in 1970 in a suburb of Tel-Aviv to parents of Moroccan and Egyptian origin and first began exploring photography in 1994, while working as a flight attendant. He studied cinematography at the New York Film Academy, then completed a five-year program in Cinematography & Still Photography at Tel-Aviv’s Camera Obscura school of visual arts.
In his first series, entitled “Views”, Israel recreated scenes from his days as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. The images he states, “addresses the fine line that divides the homo-social and the homo-erotic aspects of lives of soldiers in the army. These images depict soldiers living their lives in their brotherly proximity to each other and hint at the tensions and desires that may have existed between these young men, as they had for me during my youth in the army.”
His next series, “Fragments of Life” from 2000-2003 is a series of staged images through which he leads the viewer into his world of memories, conflicts and trapped emotions. “I recreated and reinvented fragments of my own life as an adolescent discovering his sexuality, growing up in a non-tolerant conservative society,” he states.
In 2002 after a brief stint in Madrid, he settled in London, studying for an MA in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins – University of Arts, and working on photographic series and mixed-media works. Israel is a masterful technician in terms of lighting and composition, and his photographs have been published in books and magazines, plus he’s received several prestigious awards.
Israel’s latest works look at his new life as a stranger traveling in strange lands: England, Cuba, Iceland. His works — which with time have become more thematically abstract, exploring ideas such as memory, yearning, dream and reality — are part of private and public art collections. More images are on view at his website.
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