Twenty-one photographers from around the world teamed up last week with six high school photography students for a 24-hour shoot of Tel Aviv.
Led by Canadian photojournalist Kevin Unger, they will produce a commissioned photographic exhibition of the city’s soul, as part of the Day on the Streets of... (DOTSO) ongoing photographic project. The first DOTSO exhibition was a Day on the Streets of Jerusalem, shot in 2019 and now on permanent display at Hadassah-University Medical Center, on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus.
Thursday’s shoot will make up A Day on the Streets of Tel Aviv, a photo exhibition to debut this spring, with a book and a pilot for a miniseries on streaming services expected sometime after.
“Street photographers are hunters. They’ll travel around the world and wait for hours, just to get the perfect photo. It’s more exciting than hunting, though, because you’re shooting people,” said Unger, who is now based in Israel and whose work has appeared at the annual, international photojournalism festival Visa Pour L’image in Perpignan, France, as well as in many international newspapers, magazines and books, such as The London Times, Newsweek and The Day the World Said No to War by Connie Koch.
Among the photographers who participated last week was Lil Steinberg, 66, from Antwerp, Belgium, whose photos have been exhibited in India, Italy, Israel and Belgium; Dan Bar, 74, originally from Israel, whose work has appeared in exhibits in Herzliya; and Anat Shushan, 50, from Haifa, whose work is internationally recognized and was recently exhibited in Italy.
“I found out about street photography on Instagram at @israelstreetphotos, when looking for something different to do for the day. It was so different,” says Ally Saks, 55, an administrator from Toronto. She got hooked on street photography when she took a workshop while visiting Israel and will be following the action on Thursday.
“When you tell people you’re a street photographer they just seem to accept you being there and they go on with what they naturally do. I was sitting at a table of men playing cards on a calm, quiet side street. I got some great shots and was part of the fabric of the scene. You couldn’t do that if you were just a tourist,” she added.
For more information, visit www.israelstreetphotos.com