Foto Friday – The Israel Photography Exhibition
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Pop Culture
POV, a retrospective of new works by Israel’s leading photographers/curators took place this past week at Tel Aviv’s newest landmark, the refurbished old train station structure in Neve Tzedek (pictured left). For those who missed the show (and that includes your humble scribe), POV has provided video portfolios for the group, as well as individual photographers. A portion of these works are presented in this Foto Friday column, with more to follow. Enjoy! And for those who can’t wait, visit the POV website and YouTube channel.
Show Portfolio
Moshe Shay
Yuval Tebol
David Perlov
Foto Friday – Viviana Tagar views Tel Aviv
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, Travel
“Tel Aviv is the city of light and shadows,” says photographer Viviana Tagar. “I decided to focus on the light.” Tagar, whose new book “Tel Aviv One” was recently published, wanted to redress the imbalance in how Tel Aviv is perceived abroad. “People see Tel Aviv as a city of war and despair… it was important to me to portray and present another Tel Aviv for them.” Tagar, a psychotherapist by trade, says that in her daily work she’s encountered many of the painful sides of life in Israel’s major city. “Tel Aviv has many dark aspects. It could be that because I worked with terror attack survivors and other people who lived in shadow, it was important for me to show the sides that are illuminated.”
Tagar’s book, Tel Aviv One, is available at Steimatzky and Tzomet Sfarim bookstores.
Foto Friday – Nigeria-Tel Aviv
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, coexistence, Food, Foto Friday, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Movies, Music, Travel
The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Nigeria celebrated the Tel Aviv Centennial this week with a festival of arts, culture and cuisine. The festivities, which will culminate on Sunday, included Nigerian gourmet meals prepared under the direction of Chef Charlie Fadida, executive chef of the Tel Aviv Sheraton hotel, together with the dynamic Janet Olisa, wife of the Nigerian Ambassador and a team of Nigerian culinary experts. This came in addition to performances, at the annual Jaffa Nights festival, of traditional African music, song and dance performed by troupes from Nigeria.
The festival also included the opening of a photography exhibition, “Nigeria Through the Eyes of A Passerby”, by Victor Politis. An award-winning photographer and entrepreneur, Politis is founder and CEO of PRI, an international project development and financial advisory company with a focus on emerging markets. His business travels have also afforded him the opportunity to explore his passion for photography and documenting an ever- globalizing world. More about Politis can be found here.
The Nigerian Festival Week includes a film festival featuring the best of “Nollywood“. The Nigerian movie industry, it transpires, is the third largest in the world in terms of number of films produced annually. I did not know that! The festival is held under the auspices of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, the Nigerian Friendship Association and other organizations from Israel and overseas.
Nostalgia Sunday – Sali Ariel’s Tel Aviv Bauhaus
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Travel
As Tel Aviv’s centennial gets underway and the weather warms up, more and more festive events will be held to celebrate the occasion. One of these happened last night, when the Rozin Center Gallery opened the season with an exhibition of works by painter Sali Ariel.
Originally from the States, Sali was a long-time Jerusalemite who made the move to Tel Aviv over a decade ago. As she got to know her new home, she noticed it was changing before her eyes. “I started seeing the Ramat Gan business district going up and all the big tall buildings on Rothschild Boulevard and while I don’t think that’s bad, I was afraid we would forget how Tel Aviv looked. I also felt inevitably, Tel Aviv had to change but I didn’t know if it was for better or for worse. I wanted to document it for people in the future so they would know how Tel Aviv was in our time.”
Ariel feels she looked at Tel Aviv as an outsider, “because I had just moved from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv seemed to have a bright happy fun look about it. And maybe for that reason I didn’t see the trash and crumbliness, because I was comparing it to the serious and the grayness of Jerusalem, which I also love and think is beautiful, but very different.”
Ariel started out wandering Yarkon Park and trying to sketch the natural surroundings. “But whenever I started to paint trees there were buildings peeking out form behind. And when i started to paint buildings, shockingly, a lot of what i saw was green leafy stuff — they was sort of inseparable, the two.”
Ariel was not a Bauhaus aficionado when she started working on this theme. “I was just doing buildings that looked nice to me. And then i was offered an exhibit at the Bauhaus Center and have had several exhibits since then. It also turns out that many of the building that I like are Bauhaus — but not all. Some of them are the older buildings in what’s called oriental or eclectic style.”
More works can be viewed at Sali Ariel’s website and the current exhibit will be on display at the Rozin Center Gallery in Ramat Aviv until April 22.
Foto Friday – Gabriel Benaim looks at Tel Aviv
Filed under: Art, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Travel
Photographer Gabriel Benaim is originally from Panama City and now lives and works in Tel Aviv. He studied philosophy but has in the last six years devoted himself to photography and is currently working on a long term project documenting the city of Tel Aviv on its 100th anniversary.
In this series, Benaim created compositions using the structures of Tel Aviv, the armatures, patterns and textures unique to the city. In his framing, he makes order out of the disorder, sanity out of a crazy hodge-podge.
Benaim is part of a small group of photographers worldwide who still use only traditional photographic materials, i.e. film and silver paper. He works almost exclusively with an 8×10 camera, and prints on silver chloride paper, usually Azo, the last silver chloride paper widely available, as well as its recent replacement, Lodima Fine Art paper.
It provides a range of tones and warmth that suits the Tel Aviv urban landscape as it shimmers and simmers in the hot summer sun.
It’s best to look at Benaim’s pictures full-sized on his website or on his blog, where he posts both explanations about photographic technique and discusses his work. When he began the Tel Aviv series last summer, he writes, he “was obsessed with extreme views from above, be it rooftops, hills, whatever. It was as if I had this visual idea in my head which I had to find somewhere out there…The allure of the high vantage point is fairly obvious, especially for anyone interested in abstraction. Almost anything looks interesting from above, if only because we’re so unused to the perspective.”
Viewed in black in white, rather than its true Technicolor, and from a distance, rather than street level, Benaim gives shape to the ungainly adolescent that is Israel’s biggest city — 100 years young and with a long way yet to grow.
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