I took part in a photography project created by a London based photographer, Mayah Parmenter. You can read more about the project here on Mayah’s blog. Basically, Mayah is sending disposable cameras to people around the world and asking them to take photos of their city or town.
Click on the photo to see it in a larger size!
רחוב סלומון, נווה שענן בדרום ת”א. צילמתי את התמונה הזו מבפנים התחנה המרכזית הישנה
Salamon Street, Neve Sha’anan, south Tel Aviv. I took this picture from inside the Old Central Bus Station building.
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haven’t had time to post for a while. Up next are photos of the Old Central Bus Station area in south Tel Aviv. It’s not a place that you’d be wise to wander around taking photos with an obvious camera, at least not alone, definitely not as a woman. Even in broad daylight it’s crowded with prostitutes soliciting on the streets and dodgy looking types popping in and out of the many sex shops and ‘peep shows’, there are groups of junkies… I hesitated before posting these because I loathe poverty tourism and gratutious poverty photography where the photographer congratulates him/herself for being ‘gritty’ and ‘real’. There’s no glamour in poverty. It’s just another word for fear. I’m posting them because this is a very depressing area, if you thought Tel Aviv was a rich city, maybe you can take another look.
Anyway, I took most of these from the inside of the abandoned old central bus station building. It’s been derelict for decades, and usually one cannot get inside.
A Justin Bieber (that prepubescent tweenybopper) craze has hit Israel, ahead of his upcoming gig here in Tel Aviv this Passover. His face is everywhere: posters, magazines, specially designed t-shirts in the windows of fashion stores. I overhear people talking about him in the streets. Are their kids going? Are your kids going? It’s all good.
(If you click on the picture you can see a bigger version)
Herzl Street in south Tel Aviv was one of the city’s first streets. There are still plenty of signs of its former glories and it’s also a great place to walk if you want to see a quite different side of the city from the center.
The image on the right is a giant clock with Zodiac signs on the southernmost section of the street. It’s been broken for years (of course it’s still right twice a day). This is the seedy end of the street, near No Name Alley. There are a couple of falling-to-pieces old pre-State houses here with crumbling and bricked in arched Arab-style windows, with phoney for-sale signs on them (if you call to ask the price they tell you some ridiculous sum.) This section of the street is devoted to motorbike and motorscooter shops.
The left image is a toy store in the center of the street – an area devoted to similar stores selling wholesale and retail kid’s toys and costumes. These two guys are employed to stand outside, wear silly hats and blow bubbles all day to attract customers.
The middle image is a dusty lamp and lighting store, from the light fixtures part of the street. If you walk here at the right time – round about the late afternoon as the sun goes down – you can sometimes hear a beautiful jazz trumpet being played. The player works here – he has a music school but he plays right from his light fixtures store and fills the street with music.
Further up are wholesale clothes stores. Lots of the owners are Arabic-speaking Jews and Arabs. There are also plenty of Persian Jews here, many of the older ones were born in Iran and you can hear lots of Persian being spoken if you listen carefully. At lunchtime they congregate at the two Persian restaurants in the vicinity. It’s cool to listen to snatches of Persian here and there.
We had to do a series of interior photos for my photography course last year, and it was the hardest part of the course for me. Who wants to look at pictures of my sofa or piles of mismatched socks? On the other hand, I am incredibly nosy (I’m sure that’s why I love learning so many languages, so I can listen in to people’s conversations) and like looking inside other people’s houses.
Anyway, the photos in the photo are of the VDNKh (pronounced Vee Dee En Khah) or Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, an outdoor centre in Moscow with Stalinist buildings dedicated to the amazing achievements of Communism in the former USSR (my favourites were the Rabbit Breeding Palace and the Coke machine that someone installed next to a statue of Lenin). Apparently, after 1992 it was renamed but I never heard anyone call it anything other than VDNKh.
This huge piece of land has been empty for over five years, an eternity in an area where new buildings are springing up all the time. So there must be either a dispute over it, or it’s contaminated and has to lie empty for a time. On the other three corners of the junction are olive groves, a weird thing to have in the middle of a city. Who does the land belong to and what’s its story?
(NB: the pictures look rather small in this new template, but if you want to see one larger, you can just click on it. Easy!)
