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.
Nostalgia Sunday – 1 Year Later: GLBT Youth Center
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Religion
Sometimes its important to look back at the not-so-distant past and take a measure of how far we’ve progressed — or not.
Despite yesterday’s infernal heat, thousands of people, gay and straight, gathered in Tel Aviv to mark the one-year memorial anniversary of the GLBT Drop-in Center killings that took two young lives, injured 13 physically and damaged countless others psychologically.
Last year, photographer Gil Lavi documented the spontaneous outpouring of emotion and mourning that followed the horrifying event. The shooter has still not been found.
At the time, Lavi wrote: “This occurred inside a community center for gay and lesbian youth who are afraid to come out to the wider community. A man with a loaded gun came in at around 11pm and opened fire. The statements coming from the police say that he wore a mask. You could say that all those youths who depended on this center for their free expression are forced to wear a mask on a daily basis. Their mask doesn’t cover their face, rather their soul.”
This year, there are signs of increasing tolerance on the horizon and — at least as far as the secular community is concerned — they come from an unexpected source. Orthodox rabbis and educators from Israel and abroad have created and signed a statement of principles “on the place of our brothers and sisters in our community who have a homosexual orientation”. “We hope and pray that by sharing these thoughts we will help the Orthodox community to fully live out its commitment to the principles and values of Torah and Halakha as practiced and cherished by the children of Abraham, who our sages teach us are recognized by the qualities of being rahamanim (merciful), bayshanim (modest), and gomelei hasadim (engaging in acts of loving-kindness).”
Let us hope that these prayers provide much-needed direction to the children of Abraham and come true, speedily and in our days.
Nostalgia Sunday – Machboim
Filed under: General, Movies, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture
Israeli director Dan Wolman is best-known for his film version of My Michael (1974) but another of his films, Machboim (Hide and Seek), made its own mark in 1980 as the first Israeli film about homosexuality.
If there was ever a reason to pick up a copy of Machboim, the shooting last night at a Gay-Lesbian youth drop-in center in Central Tel Aviv is enough. There have been other gay-themed films made since — from the late Amos Guttman’s film Nagua m which was hailed in 1983 as a groundbreaker for bringing AIDS to general awareness, to Yossi and Jagger (2002), about two soldiers who fall in love, which was all but mainstream at the box office.
But Machboim, which is set in 1946, was first to address the conflict, denial and ugly aggression against male homosexuality that is part and parcel of any macho society. That same machismo, the film suggests, was perhaps necessary to forge a national identity and bring the State of Israel into being, but is still rooted in the Israeli psyche. It is an uncomfortable thought.
A fairly short if uninformative interview with Woman can be found on YouTube. It’s not about Machboim. Probably just best to rent the film.
Foto Friday – Sexy Tel Aviv
Filed under: Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture, Travel
Tel Aviv nights are sultry and sexy. Or muggy or humid to the cynics. But for those who love summer in the city, going out clubbing on a Thursday night is just the right thing to do. After all, what’s a little sweat between friends?
Tel Aviv abounds with dance clubs, bars and night spots. According to the Gay Tel Aviv website, “For a great vacation, you’ve found the right place.”
The municipality also actively supports that view — and one expects no less from a city hall with a street number of 69! — and will host the annual gathering of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association this coming October. Given Tel Aviv’s gay-friendly status — and the fact that October in Israel has the loveliest weather — registration should be brisk.
This photo series was taken by citizen journalist/blogger David Shankbone, who wrote about Gay Tel Aviv, his night at the TLV club, and DJ Ofer Nissim (pictured), as follows: “One of the most excellent spectacles to behold in Israel was the amazing high energy of famous Israeli deejay Offer Nissim as several thousand men and women went insane. The entranced audience must have been what Jonestown looked like before the Kool-Aid…”
Click here for more about that night out on the town.
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