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.
Foto Friday – Hanukkah light
Filed under: Environment, Foto Friday, General, News, Religion
Hanukkah, like its other winter holiday counterparts, is all about light. This fact was pointed out to me once by a religion news reporter (yes, there are such beings), who also noted a peculiar human trait: that of making the best of things: as the days grow short, rather than curse the darkness, we celebrate the days with candles and light.
We light candles at Hanukkah (or wicks floated on olive oil) to honor the memory of the Temple rebuilt and its seven-branched menorah, with a nine-branched variant: one flame for each day of the holiday, plus the central, utilitarian shamash.
How sad, how sad and terribly ironic that the holiday which we celebrate with tiny points of light should be marred by the largest conflagration in modern Israel’s history. The winter drought – also history-making as Israel’s longest – made it a snap for the fire to take hold and spread in all its fury.
Tonight, as the flames begin to die down, we will light the third candle of Hanukkah and Friday night candlesticks. Sabbath will be followed by the work week where, together with our national mourning for lives lost and the destruction of our environment, there will be the inevitable finger-pointing, holding-of-accounts and passing-of-the-buck. Before the noise begins, take a quiet moment to consider light, the kind that illuminates the darkness and brings us joy.
© RomKri
Foto Friday – Under the Red Sea waters
Filed under: Art, coexistence, education, Environment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Movies, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Sports, Travel
The annual Epson Red Sea 2010 competition is the world’s largest marine photography competition and celebrates the best in underwater photography. It also strives to award talented underwater photographers and marine film makers with valuable prizes so that they can continue doing their work.
Earlier this month, at the awards ceremony in Eilat, the contest gave away a total of $80,000 in prize money, along with some amazing trips to top diving locales around the world.
The event features both an international competition and a local one, humorously entitled The Eilat Shoot-Out in which prizes are awarded in a variety of categories including, among others, the 5 Best Images, Fish of the Year (!) and Best Amateur where this year’s winner was Israel’s Ammar Younis.
The international competition this year also included a new category, Fashion & Nude photography, whose contestants included world famous photographers such as Switzerland’s Kurt Amsler, who counts Rolex among his clients and Germany’s Marc Hillesheim, who has worked with brands such as Orsay and won the category.
There was a kids contest, Children of Epson Red Sea. This year’s junior winner was Liraz Shaul.
Israel’s Mark Fuller took first place the main category, that of the Best Images. In addition to $10,000 check, Fuller won a three-week diving trip in Papua New Guinea for two, including airfare.
In the World Competition, categories range from Best Color Print, Best Undersea Wrecks, Best Humorous Image (including a picture of a very surprised looking sea tortoise), Enviroment & Conservation and – for shutterbugs with a taste for danger — the Sharks Category, won by Nicolas Barraque of France.
The winning Eilat Video Clip was “Ocean Dreams” by Eytan Nadel, who won a diving safari in Bali and a DiveRoss video housing to make more fun and exciting underwater movies. Check this one out — and there are more videos on the competition’s YouTube channel to enjoy. And of course, all works by winners and nominees can be viewed on the competition website.
Foto Friday – Olives take center stage
Filed under: Business, coexistence, Environment, Foto Friday, General, health, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Politics, Social Justice, Travel
The humble olive finds itself in the eye of a political storm this year with reports of violence and vandalism from all sides. (Perhaps the fairest assessment of the situation comes from a new Oxfam report which puts the blame squarely on… well… everyone, which is kind of refreshing). Meanwhile, the fruit of the Olea Europaea tree is ripening and olive-picking activities – also on all sides – are at their peak.
The annual Galilee and Golan Olive Branch Festival started last week and features two weekends of activities for tourists to Israel’s northern region. The festival, a joint initiative of the Ministry for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee, the Galilee Development Authority and the Israel Olive Board is being held under the slogan “A Tribute to the Olive in Different Cultures”.
Activities include visits to olive presses, workshops, hikes, cycling tours, spas and gourmet eating. In addition, an Open House initiative offers visitors a glimpse into the lives of Galilee residents – Jews, Arabs, Druze, Circassian – including traditional food, music and crafts.
Hananya Farm is one of the country’s major producers of olive oil. Located in the Western Galilee, it is both the headquarters of the Olive Board and one of the festival’s four information centers, offering a wide range of workshops and activities.
These include picking and pressing the olives in an old-fashioned press, guided olive oil tasting, explanations about the olive harvest, an arts and crafts fair, farmers market and musical performances beneath the olive trees. Guided hikes (many with KKL-JNF guides), cycle and jeep tours are also available.
A few words about the Olive Board. A statutory body representing the interests of Israel’s olive producers, it sets standards for olive oil quality and production. In recent years it has adopted an additional aim: promoting the health benefits related to olive oil consumption. Their website contains a range of information, from the history of the olive in Mediterranean culture to the varieties of olives grown in Israel, like Barnea, which was bred specifically for modern olive and olive oil production methods. Truth be told (and it’s worth reading the Oxfam report with this in mind) stone presses are nice for promotional festivals and niche markets but that’s not really how this stuff gets made – or makes it – in the mass market.
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