Photo by Vittoria Mentasti
Photographer Vittoria Mentasti and I went to the Unmanned Vehicle Israel Defense conference outside of Tel Aviv. Drones are big business in Israel and the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry here has been the leading worldwide exporter of drone systems since the mid-1980's.
At the conference, Israeli companies spoke about testing out new drone systems during the war in Gaza and unrest in Jerusalem this past summer.
you can see more here, on Middle East Eye.
I worked with journalist, Ben Hattem, on a of couple of articles covering Jerusalem Day, an annual Israeli holiday that commemorates the reunification of the city following the Six Day War in 1967. Many Palestinians consider the festivities to be an aggressive expression of Israeli nationalism and the day is marked by protests and clashes around Damascus Gate in East Jerusalem.
You can read about it and see some of my photographs on Vice News and Middle East Eye.
I met Hassan Saad a few weeks ago in Gaza City. He keeps a bunch of used car batteries in his garage that he has hooked up to a series of LED lights that run all over his neighborhood and into 60 of his neighbors' homes. Hassan undertook this project as an act of charity, dedicated to the soul of his father who had recently passed away.
A slideshow with more photographs from the night is up on Vocativ.
Some of my photos from Ramallah were published on Vice for their Paradise Series. Unlike other posts in the series that poke fun at whatever city is featured, I wanted to show Ramallah as a strange and wonderful place. They altered my short introduction, here's what I originally wrote:
"I moved to Ramallah last year to work as a newspaper photographer for a newspaper. Coming from Brooklyn, I found the city to be equal parts friendly and odd. In my memories, smells of Arabic coffee and sweet shisha smoke wafting out of cafes mix with the stink of burning garbage and the sting of teargas from clashes at the nearby Qalandiya checkpoint.
Ramallah sits in the middle of an ongoing conflict that is so entwined with daily life that sometimes, when I was swept up in the everyday bustle, I didn’t even notice it."
An article for Vice about ultra-Orthodox Jews - Haredim - holding an anti-draft rally in Jerusalem. The event was attended by hundreds of thousands and effectively shut down parts of the city for most of the day. You can read the story and see some of my photos here.
Vice published a story I worked on with Dylan Collins along with with my photos of a protest in the Jordan Valley, in the village of Ein Hijleh.
Over the course of a week, hundreds of Palestinian and international activists occupied the village, that was depopulated in the 1967 war, in protest of Israel's occupation the region.
You can read all about it here.
The only zoo in the West Bank is in the city of Qalqilya. In addition to the living animals is a museum of taxidermy animals, most of whom died during the Second Intifada. The zoo’s director, a self-taught taxidermist, preserved the animals in an unintentionally sad and strange exhibit.
More of my photos and an article about the zoo on VICE.
I’m happy to have my Goldwater project featured on the Prison Photography. Writer and photo editor Pete Brook, created the blog in order to, “To bring to attention things previously unsaid,” and, “To joust in the melee of contested meanings in surveillance, fine-art, documentary, amateur, institution, and virtual photographies of prisons and other sites of incarceration.”
You can view the post here.
I’ll be participating in the RISC training program at the end of the month. RISC, Reporters Instructed In Saving Colleagues, is an intensive battlefield medial-response course that is provided free of charge to freelance journalists who work in conflict zones. I’m humbled to be participating in the program along side experienced photojournalists and reporters and to have the opportunity to show my work at the Bronx Documentary Center.
NEW YORK EDITED
Photographs from my Roosevelt Island project along with 15 of my fellow students from ICP last year are in a new book titled New York Edited. The publication is a collaboration between photographers from ICP PJ program (NYC), class 2011/2012 and editors from Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie (Berlin), class 2012/2013. It’s printed by Pepperoni Books (Berlin).
You can see more here.
A documentary project that I worked on while attending ICP last year was published on the NYC news-site, Gothamist. The project focused on the lives of two men who were paralyzed in similar diving accidents and are now best friends, living in the State-Run Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, NYC.
I wrote an accompanying article that details the planned closure of the hospital to make way for a major university science and technical institute, and highlights my subjects’ dissatisfaction with their planned relocation.
You can see the photos and article here.