© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

One of your latest exhibitions is on the ‘South West Jerusalem’ project. I would like to introduce our readers to this work that has involved you for nearly 20 years ... Let’s start with the neighborhood. I know you are very attached to this part of the city. Here you grew up and here you still live with your family. For those unfamiliar with this place, can you tell us about it? And tell us about how it was growing up in this part of the city?

Yaakov Israel: The neighborhoods of South West Jerusalem – Kiryat HaYovel, Kiryat Menachem and Katamonim – were established in the 1950s as transitional housing solutions for the many immigrants arriving in Israel in the early years after independence. Over the years these public housing solutions became home to many working-class people. We moved to Brazil street in Kiryat HaYovel neighborhood when I was seven. The flat was located in a complex of apartment blocks that were located on the hillside leading down to the village of Ein Karem. Our neighbors were mostly from North Africa, Syria, Iraq, and Iran and didn’t really relate to my English-speaking parents that immigrated from South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). But for us kids, we quickly made friends with the other kids that lived around us and spent most of our free hours outside roaming the hillsides and the streets. The grown-ups were too busy trying to make a living to pay much attention to us so for the most part we were left to ourselves. At the time I didn’t think much about it but in retrospect, it was really great.

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

Your photographs on South West measure a specific urban plot and texture characterized by public housing complexes and interventions. Some of these show the signs of time, a sort of worn out aspect. Yet there is a certain vitality. What’s going on in this neighborhood? What kind of transformations is happening? In the last ten years, in many European cities, we registered a decade of neoliberal social housing and public policies, along with an uprising of neoliberal attitudes to the government of space. Is this the case for Jerusalem?

YI: The public housing built in Jerusalem was meant to be a short-term, temporary solution that became permanent. I guess that the financial challenges made it easy for the decision makers to forget about the temporal aspect. The residents, in an attempt to make the best of the cramped living conditions, often changed the interior of the apartments. These renovations included opening new windows where none had been and thus changing the exteriors in a way that often contributed to their rundown look. These neighborhoods, with their socialist-inspired architecture and the complications of living in these conditions, are the invisible parts of Jerusalem. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they don’t play an important part in the city’s history, and in my life. For that reason, I chose to photograph them as you mentioned, with a certain “vitality”. I aim to embed into the images the patina of time and hints of life there: the life of the building and the life of those who live in it. In spite of the many complications of living here, there is a certain beauty that comes from the simplicity – a raw, unpretentious beauty. Nowadays the housing problems in Jerusalem have led the municipality to decide it’s about time to rebuild these neighborhoods as high-rise apartment buildings. A half-baked idea that doesn’t take into account the current working-class residents who cannot afford the cost of maintaining these new buildings; nor the current infrastructure that barely functions as it is with amount of people living here already.

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

What I like very much about the series is that it shows a side very different from what one would expect from Jerusalem, one of the most disputed cities in history. Your look moves behind the postcard, the remembrance of the ancient and sacred city, to focus on a less inflated narrative, showing us a more modern, common, cosmopolitan face of Jerusalem. It’s much more an autobiographical look in this sense, an attempt to give significance to less flashy places, to a hidden city, to the B side of the musical tape, to the lesser-known tracks. What has driven you to persevere for nearly 20 years on this front?

YI: I have always thought of these neighborhoods and the people living in them as those who maintain the city – the people who in many ways maintain the postcard aspects of Jerusalem. I started making these images as my BFA graduation project in 2001, but after graduating it still felt that the work had just begun. I kept slowly photographing without a deadline – some years more than others. Over the years I found myself looking at the environment and thinking how it was slowly changing and that soon gentrification will change the social structure and its look forever. This made me decide to try to finalize the project in the near future. It seems a nice idea to have it encompass 20 years – it’s a span of years that will allow me to visually describe the way the people and life looked like here in this period of time. Before the new high-rise buildings attract the bourgeoisie and the place transforms. In a way, it is the B side of Jerusalem and for sure every city has these B side neighborhoods but I’m not sure it will stay a B side for much longer.

Portraits play an important role in this series. There’s a sort of quest for dignity for the invisible. Who are these people? What is their importance in your story?

YI: The people are normal people that live here that I come across while walking around the neighborhood or that approach me while I’m photographing. The view camera has a presence and attracts interest – and my presence generates conversations that may sometimes end with me making a portrait. Most people don’t understand why I’m going to such lengths to photograph the neighborhood, but some are happy to participate. For me, the people I photograph are of many types, but they all have qualities that I recognize as representative in many small ways of the residents of these neighborhoods, as I came to know them while growing up here. And in a way, they all represent a person that is archetypical of the place. Photographing working class people with a camera that may be used to portray people of importance is always on my mind while making the images. I know that when I exhibit them the beautifully detailed image created by this photographic apparatus lures people to look deeper into the image – sometimes before even seeing the subject of the photograph. Thus, the invisible becomes momentarily visible.

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

I wonder from a methodological point of view what criteria did you follow in exploring the area? Or did you let yourself be inspired by memories?

YI: In the beginning, I photographed places that I knew well but at a certain point I started broadening the scope. I am always taking long walks, with and without the camera looking for places I don’t know or may have overlooked. The buildings I chose to photograph represent the way these places were before they started to gentrify. So, I didn’t open a map and go street by street its really based on real life experiences.

As I said before the whole series ‘South West Jerusalem’ covers a range of 20 years. Given its importance in terms of being a historical documental, how do you plan to publicize it? And I wonder about the feedback and interactions with other experts such as planners, sociologists, architects...

YI: Over the years this project led to collaborations with theorists from the field of architecture such as Dr. Shelly Cohen and Professor Haim Yacobi who exhibited the project at The Architects House Gallery and wrote texts that expanded on the architectural history of these neighborhoods and the apartment blocks in Israel. Some years later I met Dr. Mark Long, a curator and a political geographer, and the personal/social/political aspect that is the basis for most of my work, certainly for “South West Jerusalem”, created many points of common interest that laid the foundations for a long-lasting professional collaboration that in many ways connects disciplines – photography and geography being the obvious ones.

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

© Yaakov Israel from the series 'South West Jerusalem'

You have been working recently on exhibiting the work to the public. Tell us more about it and which drivers motivate the show

YI: For many years now I’ve been thinking about ways to expose the communities in which I’m working to the images with the hope of generating ideas about their life in these parts of the city. A few years back the work sparked a conversation with Asaf Cohen and Yitzhak Izek Mizrahi who curate Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem. This venue is an open-air gallery that includes five large scale double sided lightboxes located in the center of town. A year ago, they decided to invite Dr. Mark Long to be a guest curator with them of an exhibition of the work. The show was mounted a few weeks before the coronavirus pandemic locked us all up indoors, so it was decided to let it run till July. As the gallery is situated in front of the tram station for trams coming from South West Jerusalem, many people from the neighborhoods found themselves looking at large-scale images of buildings they know so well. While discussing the work I told Cohen and Mizrahi that I wanted to publish a one-off newspaper about the project that included a variety of texts about South West Jerusalem written by Long, Cohen and Yacobi, along with Dr. Gid’on Lev, Yamit Nataf and myself. And to give it out for free on a Friday in the shopping centers of these neighborhoods. The idea is to surround the images with texts that span from the theoretical to the personal, academic, essays, and fiction with the hope of allowing the residents to contemplate aspects of life here that perhaps are not thought about during daily life. Cohen and Mizrahi got excited about it and raised the money, and we have commissioned Nino Biniashvili, an amazing Jerusalem-based book artist and designer that I have collaborated with before, to design it. Then the corona situation got in the way, but now that life is slowly getting back to normal, we have rescheduled and are finalizing the newspaper. We plan to print and distribute it for free in July/August and hopefully avoid the second wave of the pandemic. With this, I’m hoping to give back something to the community of South West Jerusalem, which I’m part of and have been working in for many years now.

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020

Always in connection with the exhibition, and your role as an educator. The recent health crisis that has eliminated physical relationships and emptied museums lead us to reflect on alternative ways of exhibiting research and projects. What are your thoughts on the matter?

YI: These last few months have changed many aspects of our lives worldwide. The art world and its economy have been dramatically affected, and here in Israel exhibition spaces are certainly some of the last places to re-open their doors. I can’t begin to imagine how the ways we experience art will change in retrospect to these events. In education, I can already see how art schools are reevaluating their curriculums given the uncertain future. With the situation being as it is, I’m happy that the exhibition is in a public space which means it’s still accessible. Teaching and designing the newspaper keep my mind busy; but to be honest, my worries, together with those of most people at the moment are connected to other aspects of life in these challenging times, especially for freelancers.

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020 

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020

Gitai Silver © Installation view 'South West Jerusalem', Black Box, 97 Jaffa Street Gallery, in Jerusalem, 2020

We are currently both in self-isolation. I know that despite the difficulties you are using this period to measure yourself through photography with your home space and your family relationships. Tell us about it...

YI: We began a self-initiated quarantine a few days before the official social distancing regulations began. For someone whose daily tempo is one of constant movement and interaction with the world, staying home for so long wasn’t easy. After figuring out remote teaching, I began a photographic diary of sorts in an attempt to deal with the stillness and repetitive qualities of this new way of life. I titled the project “Staying Home” and followed the same gridlines I gave my students – each day, try to make an image that represents that day. Pointing the lens inwards was a new and interesting experience and very quickly it became a way to communicate with friends here and overseas by posting the project on Instagram. It made me think that in most of my work I’m pointing the lens outwards to look inward and with this project I was looking inwards to communicate outwards.   

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LINKS
Yaakov Israel personal website | Instagram | Facebook
Blackbox Street Gallery | Instagram | Facebook