Foto Friday – Viewing Israel with Rafael Ben-Ari
Filed under: Art, design, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Picture of the Week, Travel
Rafael Ben-Ari is a noted Israeli photographer and educator with over 20 years experience. He’s worked for Israeli and international newspapers and magazines, traveled extensively and his photographs has been presented at exhibitions and countries around the world.
Ben-Ari also runs Israel Photo Tours, which offers one-on-one private photography workshops and lessons in Israel. These are day tours, says Ben-Ari, “for photographers on all levels who are serious about their craft and wish to improve their skills while seeing Israel.”
Ben-Ari’s experience with cameras ranges from analog 35mm, digital, and SLR to panoramic and underwater cameras. Light is essential to his work and on location, he makes use of both artificial and available light and light. His students, he states, “learn the art of using light to capture the true essence of Israel”.
He suggests various tour itineraries, such as the ancient, sun-washed city of Acre for those who love the picturesque…
© Rafael Ben-Ari/Chameleons Eye
The dusty Negev desert for those interested in archeology and nature…
© Rafael Ben-Ari/Chameleons Eye
Jerusalem, the city central to Judaism…
© Rafael Ben-Ari/Chameleons Eye
The places holy to three monotheistic religions…
© Rafael Ben-Ari/Chameleons Eye
And for a change of pace, the beaches, sun and fun of Tel Aviv.
© Rafael Ben-Ari/Chameleons Eye
There are a lot more wonderful pictures to view on the Israel Photo Tours website, along with contact information, itineraries and testimonials.
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!
Nostalgia Sunday – Bialik Street cultural center
Filed under: design, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles, Travel
Bialik Street is one of Tel Aviv’s little gems. Once an important location for the homes of not only Israel’s national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, but also that of artist Reuven Rubin and Tel Aviv’s first city hall, the street turned dingy and dumpy for many years. It began picking up in popularity in the 1980s when Shenkin Street became trendy and now plans are afoot to turn the whole street into a center of Hebrew culture.
It’s a fitting tribute to Bialik whose house at No. 22 has, since 1937, served as a museum. It’s intention, as the Bialik Association put it was as “[a] national home, a house of the people of Israel in Eretz-Israel and in the Diaspora. Let us make this house into a storeroom for the soul of Hebrew culture; let us never extinguish the light which the poet lit in it! The house will serve as a repository for all the things connected to him and his work; a storeplace for Hebrew folklore, a gathering place for Hebrew writers and a center for Hebrew culture.”
In addition to archives, a library, paintings, furniture and many other items connected to his various activities as a poet, publisher, literary figure and Zionist leader, the house itself is something to see. It was built by architect Joseph Minor in 1925. Minor along with his teacher Alexander Baerwald, was part of a group of architects inspired by the Art and Crafts movement that wished to develop Hebrew architecture. In the case of Bialik House, the result was a building that combined western construction with romantic notions about “Orientalia” – towers, domes, pointed-arch windows and ceramic tiles designed by Zeev Raban, the foremost decorative artist of the day.
In his fine essay about Bialik House, author Yonatan Dubosarsky wrote, “The institutions which had been headed by Bialik located some of their activities in the house. Thus the Hebrew Writers Association was active in Beit Bialik and from there published its monthly magazine, which still exists, Moznayim (“Scales”). The Committee for Language and the Association of Friends of the Hebrew University in Tel Aviv met there. Similarly, courses were organized on behalf of the Vaad Leumi (the pre-state national leadership committee) for groups of youth leaders from the United States. Beit Bialik quickly became a tourist attraction for visitors to Tel Aviv. Teachers began to bring kindergarten and school children – a tradition that has continued to this day, and which over 70 years has brought the majority of Israels children to the house.”
Even if you’re not an Israeli schoolchild, a visit to Bialik House and the street’s other cultural institutions is a delightful way to spend an morning or an afternoon. Plus, once you’re done sightseeing, you can cool down with some iced coffee at Cafe Bialik (No. 2 on the street).
Nostalgia Sunday – The Levant Fair
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel
Sukkot is festival and exhibition season in Israel which means everything will be celebrated, feted and displayed over the coming weeks. But, though they may not know it, they owe a debt to the granddaddy of all Israeli events, the Levant Fair.
Fairs in the Yishuv, the early Jewish settlement, first started in the 1920s as agricultural exhibitions but by the second half of the decade their nature had changed to commercial and industrial. According to Levant Fair collector and historian Dr. Arthur H. Groten, “The need to promote the Palestine of the Yishuv, as the Jews of Palestine were called, as a vital economic link between West and East reflected the cosmopolitan attitude of many of the new immigrants…”
The 1932 Palestine and Near East Fair was the first to be called a “Levant Fair” and “was the first to have official foreign governmental representation including Great Britain, U.S.S.R, Egypt, Cyprus, Romania, Turkey, Switzerland, Poland, Latvia and Bulgaria. 831 foreign firms exhibited and 285,000 people attended.”
It was that year that the fair adopted a new mascot: a flying camel. (Groten relates “an apocryphal tale” that when Tel Aviv’s Mayor Meir Dizengoff said to his colleague, the Mayor of Jaffa that he wished for his city to host a Levant Fair similar to those held throughout the Near East, “he was told that it would happen ‘when camels fly’”). True or not, the logo was much loved; it appeared on stamps, and is still used today by the Israel Trade Fairs & Convention Center.
But things really got going in 1934, “through the construction of an entirely new complex on the banks of the Yarkon River by a group of young architects, trained in Europe, many at the Bauhaus, under the direction of Arieh El-Hanani. The fairgrounds were an integrated assemblage of International Style buildings. In fact, it was the largest such integrated grouping ever constructed… Over 600,000 visitors paid to attend an event that included 36 foreign governments and 2200 firms (1500 being foreign).”
El-Hanani also designed the sculpture “Hapoel HaIvri” (The Jewish Worker), one of the Yishuv’s first works of urban public art.
On a personal note: my Israeli mother was born in Jerusalem in 1929; five years later, her family came to live in Tel Aviv. So I like to think that maybe, just maybe, she was one of the children who climbed on the statue, sat on her mother’s knee during the opening ceremony audience or rode the “Luna Park” carousel.
The last fair, held in 1936, was not well-attended due to the increasingly troubled situation in Europe, the rise of Nazism and the war against the Jews, as well as the Arab revolt.
Over the years, the fairgrounds fell into disrepair and the pavilions used mainly as ceramic and tile warehouses. The port closed to ships in 1965. The fairgrounds were moved to North Tel Aviv. Only in 2001 did reconstruction of the historic Tel Aviv port commence and with it, the rehabilitation of the Bauhaus structures — those few that remain. However, the statue of a flying camel still sits atop a flagpole at the main entrance and the modernist statue of the Hebrew Worker has also survived.
Today’s photos come mainly from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, a rich source of historical images of the Middle East photographed from 1898 to 1946.
For more about the early days of Tel Aviv, see “City of Work and Prosperity”: The Levant Fair, part of the Eliasaf Robinson Tel Aviv Collection at Stanford University. And there are more great photographs of the Levant Fair on a site called Abraham Stern’s Tel Aviv.
Also, check out Dr. Arthur H. Groten’s wonderful collection of stamps, ephemera and additional photos of the fair in his online paper, Semiotics and the Levant Fairs of Palestine. It is an amazing and enjoyable read.
Foto Friday – 3D Israel
Filed under: Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Pop Culture, Religion, Travel
Writing about the 3D Israel doesn’t do this site justice. Neither does showing a few still images of what is essentially a dynamic online experience; with just a few clicks, users can experience panoramic 360 degree tours of Israel. How fun is that?!
The most popular visits to the site are, of course, to well-known tourist attractions. Old Jaffa’s newly renovated main square, for example. (Click on the link or the picture for the full effect).
Or the Eilat underwater observatory.
But there are lesser-known sites as well, such as the machtesh, a unique crater formation at Mizpe Ramon.
There are holy sites as well, such as the Church of All Nations on the Mount of Olives. The 360 degree rotation allows viewers to see the church from one side…
…to the other.
3Disrael’s virtual tours require Adobe Flash player 9 or higher (free download at www.adobe.com). Navigation is very simple. To zoom in or rotate, just point the arrow icon in the direction you want to go and left-click on the mouse button.
The tours are produced by ByTech which, since 1999, has been offering digital imaging services to tourist sites and, more recently, to hotels and restaurants (in case you want to “try before you buy” — at least virtually!).
The most recent tour on the site is the Tel Aviv Musix festival, which took place last month.
The festival was also documented by photographer Mehman Asadov who’s posted two collections about the event on YouTube. The background music sets the festival mood. Enjoy!
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