Professionals

I live in Tel-Aviv on Dubnov Street. Last spring, I found an old "Rolliflex" camera which belonged to my father. I began to photograph the people who get up every morning and come to my neighborhood to make a living. I call them the professionals.

The exhibition presents twelve photographs of people I know since childhood: the pediatrician, the kindergarten teacher, the grocer, the shoemaker, the electricians, the greengrocers, the school headmaster, the fine arts theoretician, the house-keeper, the toy store owners, the house-ware store owners and the people who work at the photocopy shop. In many ways, these people raised me.

This group, together with the people who live in the neighborhood, form a community. This community created me, the one who sees himself as an artist.

My neighborhood is my homeland and my country. Its boundaries define my own Tel-Aviv: in the north- Ramat-Aviv, in the south- Jaffa, in west- the sea and in the east- Jerusalem. This is how I see my hometown. When I was a child, attending the "Hayovel" elementary school, my mother started sending me to the grocer to buy supplies. That is how I came to know Itzhak, Betty and their children- Yossi, Cochav, Oren and Chen. As I grew up, my mother sent me on more and more errands and through this route I discovered the neighborhood. At first, I would go to Erich, the shoemaker, or to Avraham from the house-ware store in my father's or my mother's name. Gradually, they came to know me and I came to know them. Somewhere along the way, they became my extended family.

The professionals have been working in the neighborhood for many years. Some of them live in this neighborhood, and they have all become part of it.

In the exhibition, each photograph of a professional is placed in the working surroundings of another. This creates a network that testifies to the relations between the professionals: Erich shops at the electricians' and they shop at Itzhak's grocery. One can get the feel of the neighborhood while taking a stroll from one photograph to the other. This is my neighborhood and in my imagination I see it as a community.

Joshua Simon