Brendan Bernhard says:
As depicted by Violet Kashi, Tel Aviv is a city whose human population is constantly impinged upon by dogs, cats, birds, and other, occasionally quite mysterious creatures, and they clearly feel they belong there.
This is certainly true of the ethnically diverse feline ruffians captured in this photograph. Some look as if they're ready to start a riot -- for equal rights perhaps -- while the two black cats in the center of the image are obviously trying to put a hex on the lady with the camera.
Glimpsed on what appears to be a residential stretch of sidewalk, the cats are both comic and sinister, familiar yet alien, and they bring this quiet little corner of the city to strange and delightful life.
Brendan Bernhard says:
With a few memorable exceptions, the people in Kashi's pictures generally don't seem to mind being photographed all that much. Caught unawares, they gaze at her camera with meditative candor rather than indignation, as if it were their intellectual duty to treat the Fuji X-100 as one of those devices of modernity whose presence and purpose should be considered in a historical context rather than simply rebuked. To live is to be recorded.
Even this man, forced to suffer the indignity of being digitally duplicated with a shopping list between his teeth, seems at peace with the process. Like so many of Kashi's subjects, he has a wonderfully emotive, unrobotic face. With his mouth temporarily clamped shut, it's left to his eyes to do the talking, and they tell a dozen stories.
Brendan Bernhard says:
This enigmatic photograph has a jewel-like precision that beguiles the viewer while compounding the enigma. The first time I saw it -- I need a better screen -- I thought Kashi had managed to imbue the figure of the surfer calmly paddling toward shore with the mystical aura of a beach-bum Messiah about to make landfall. On closer inspection, however, I noticed that he, or should I say He, was paddling away from shore rather than toward it, apparently with no intention of coming back. As for the man at the water's edge looking down at his right sneaker, at first I thought he was examining a rock or even a football. In fact, from the way he's staring at it, you'd think it was a skull. It's that kind of photograph, tripping you up every time you look at it. Finally there is the bird on the left, the one non-human in the scene. Crows are rarely good news on the symbolic level, but this one's positioning is flawless. Hitting its mark like an experienced actor, it neatly ties this trio of haunted, mismatched figures into an Israeli Bermuda Triangle of Total and Eternal Mystery. If Salvador Dali had been a street photographer, he might have come up with something like this.
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