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Foto Friday – Edward Kaprov helps splice the ends

Splicing the Ends is the name of a new art exhibition that opens next week, November 28th, at the Amiad Center in Old Jaffa. Over the past two years, Amiad has emerged as a unique center for the arts in Jaffa’s newly revived Flea Market area, now a hot nightlife spot for Tel Aviv’s young bohemian set.

According to the organizers, the exhibit celebrates the winter season festivals for the three major monotheistic religions — Hannuka, Christmas and Eid ul Fitr — by “telling the story of mankind through the different religions… exploring the themes of immigration, living as an individual and as part of a community, and how one relates to oneself and to one’s environment.”

The show features works by over 30 painters, sculptors and photographers , including Edward Kaprov. A veteran immigrant to Israel from the former Soviet Union, Kaprov has worked with Israel’s biggest newspapers including business daily Globes, Haaretz and Yedioth Aharonot. His features have been published by National Geographic, GEO, and Russian Newsweek as well as other publications.

His work on display in “Splicing the Ends” deals with how religion informs day-to-day life in Israel, whether in the army…

…at a soup kitchen for hungry children…

…motivating political protest…

Kaprov’s work ranges from news and commercial photography to personal projects, including a series on Shamanism in Israel.

Splicing the Ends runs from November 28 through December 21 at the Amiad Center. A portion of the proceeds from the exhibit will go to ILAN, Israel’s Foundation for the Handicapped.

Foto Friday – Menachem Kahana lifts the haredi veil

The haredi world is one that secular Israelis find alternately fascinating and disturbing, filled with rituals and mystery. Photographer Menahem Kahana, who works for French news agency AFP, has been documenting the ultra-Orthodox community for years.

In a new exhibit, now on at Tel Aviv’s Eretz Israel Museum, Kahana presents a body of work begun in 1995, when he happened upon a spring where some young haredi men were swimming.

Over the years, as he continued his documentation, the community opened up to him: synagogues, celebrations, and rituals both usual, such as weddings…

… and unusual, such as the pidyon ha-ben in which first-born sons are redeemed by their families from service to the High Priests of the Temple…

…and the peter hamor, which which first born donkeys are as well.

And everyday life, too.

Click on this link to learn more about Kahana’s work.

Foto Friday – Sharon Yaari

Was it real or did I dream it? Photography on one hand, can document fact. On the other hand, it creates illusions, presents images without context to leave any narrative up to the observer, or records people, places, and things that have passed. By its very nature, photographs are short-lived, comprised of fragile paper, film, or – worse yet – digital data that will disappear forever with one good wave of a magnet.

SharonYaari is an award winning photographer whose work has long dealt with the temporal. His new solo show “Jerusalem Boulevard” now at the Sommer Gallery in Tel Aviv are large-format photos of things readily identifiable as part of daily life in Israel: a checkered blanket of the kind that everyone used to have (we called them “sochnut blankets” when I made aliya, because the Jewish Agency distributed them to new immigrants); a classic semicircular Tel Aviv Bauhaus balcony; Ibex lying under a eucalyptus tree; a chair and some flowers; a woman at what is clearly (for Israelis) a memorial site.

They are at once familiar and at the same time, raise questions on a practical level: Do they make those blankets any more? Aren’t the Ibex in danger of extinction? Will the Bauhaus structures, whose architectural philosophy never intended them to stand forever, survive urban pollution? Is that woman from the Twenties? The Forties? The Eighties? Now?

They also raise questions on an existential level… does everything fade and die as undoubtedly these flowers did long ago?

“Jerusalem Boulevard” will be at the Sommer Gallery through March 21st.

Refugee photography

Since late 2006, an estimated 10,000 African refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in Israel, crossing the border with Egypt on foot. After a long period of not knowing what to do with these people, several governmental bodies have since begun assisting them via a variety of humanitarian projects.

NGOs have been paying attention as well, with initiatives like Fugee Fridays organizing grassroots efforts to bring food from the Carmel Market to hungry refugees. A related organization, called ActiveVision, offering activities and workshops for refugees in the digital visual media arts. Since the late summer, one workshop project called “Asylum City” has taught a group of pupils how to operate still and video cameras as tools for conveying a message. Assignments mostly focused on documenting the community of asylum seeking families living in Tel Aviv, with the results yielding a print publication and a photo exhibition.

As Fugee Fridays co-founder Daniel Cherrin puts it in a recent piece for Haaretz,

The [Asylum City] course was extremely successful and instructors were able to teach the importance of filmmaking and storytelling both in theory and in practice. As a result, some very interesting and important films were produced. The group thus also actively takes part in spreading the awareness of their own situation.

Many of the older images from Asylum City can be seen here, while the latest batch, including profiles of some of the photographers, can be seen here. A slideshow of images from the workshops themselves can be seen here. Last week, a photo exhibition opened at the Shapira Quarter home of Y Circus.

Foto Friday – Yuval Nadel

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 – Israel Thai Style

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.

Contemporary old portraits

Today marks the opening of a new photo exhibition at the Jerusalem Theatre’s Rebecca Crown Plaza. Entitled Centenarians in Israel, the show, running through January 14, focuses on Israel’s extreme elderly.

The project has been spearheaded by Eshel, a non-profit support organization aimed at defending the rights and improving the living conditions of older people in Israel. Kicking off a year’s worth of 2009 gala events celebrating the organization’s 40th birthday, Eshel operates under the umbrella of the Israeli government and the Israeli branch of the Joint Distribution Committee.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the portraits were all photographed by Ofir Ben Natan, an in-house photographer at the Joint. Ben Natan’s work on this project is a far cry from the standard capturing of events that one might expect from an NGO staffer, effectively capturing the dignity of these weathered individuals, in the intimate settings of their living spaces, often surrounded by their most valued belongings and ordinary knickknacks. As an exploration of Israeli identity, the body of work is likewise provocative, especially since the Israelis photographed here were all at least 40 years of age when the state was born.

All in all, the exhibit covers 12 individuals, all aged 100 to 108, in 24 large prints accompanied by context-enhancing bio blurbs. For interested parties who might not be able to make it to the Jerusalem Theatre in the coming weeks, more photos from the series (but smaller, and with nothing in the way of background information) can be seen by clicking here.

Foto Friday – Hedgehogs in Tel Aviv

Israelis love hedgehogs. So much so that instead of Big Bird, the Israeli version of Sesame Street featured a large hedgehog named Kipi Kipod. This affinity makes sense because the hedgehog, like your typical Israeli sabra, is prickly on the outside, but cute and cuddly underneath. Well, at least, your typical sabra male would have you think so.

Anyway, back to the small spiny nocturnal insectivorous mammal of the subfamily Erinaceinae. Photographer Yuval Chen’s exhibition Hedgehog (Kipod) opened last week at the Artists’ House in Tel Aviv. Chen spent almost two years snapping shots of hedgehogs in the urban landscape. “I was looking for them in the middle of the night, several times in a week – I found them many times on the grass in the yards of the buildings.”

Chen spends his days working as a photojournalist at daily newspaper Yedihot Aharonot. The exhibition, he says, examines nature and man, and asks whether these are opposing or collaborative forces. Chen notes that the images anthropomorphize the lives of hedgehogs dwelling in the city by contrasting them with human life, but that all of his subjects are Tel Aviv residents.

Here are a few images from the Hedgehog exhibition; more can be found at Chen’s Facebook page or at the Artists’ House where, if you’re lucky and it’s dark enough, a real hedgehog may greet you at the entrance.

Foto Friday – Israel Then and Now

In honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary, the World Zionist Organization put together a traveling exhibition of holographic panels about Israeli achievements, past and future.

ISRAEL21c animated the images into a slide show, and while we can’t hope to reproduce the holograms (produced by Israeli innovator MagInk), the overlaid images still convey the powerful message about six decades of Israeli advancements in technology, healthcare, education and democracy.

Foto Friday – Holy Land

Photographer Guy Raivitz recently announced a new work in progress, “Holy Land”, in which he explores the three major religions that put Jerusalem and the land of Israel at their center. Each one of these photos is part of a larger series.

A Coptic nun at the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Photo: Guy Raivitz

Ravitz is interested in the internal process of worship and how it is exernalized.

‘Lag Ba’omer’ celebrations, Mt. Meron northern Israel. Photo: Guy Raivitz

Muslim man praying near Temple mount, Jerusalem. Photo: Guy Raivitz

He is respectful of his subjects, always bearing in mind that what they are doing is not for show. To see more of “Holy Land”, visit Guy’s website.

 

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