[ back ]
Zooming in to capture a moment
(by Maggie Fazeli Fard - March 26, 2008)
 |
Photos courtesy of Naomi Weinberg
“Leaning and Looking in the Pisac Market.”
|
Arbah chamesh!
Wandering through an Israeli marketplace, Naomi Weinberg’s ears perked up when she heard these words.
Arbah chamesh! a deep voice called again. The River Vale attorney clutched her beloved Minolta digital camera and set out to find the source of all the commotion.
“I had to know who was selling four of what for five sheqels,” she now explains with a laugh. “The voice just caught you.”
She followed the voice’s trail through the busy market, where she was spending a few free hours during a business trip, until, finally, she found him.
Arbah chamesh! shouted a man, seated and flailing a bundle of scallions toward the crowd.
Click. Weinberg had her moment.
“I love to catch a moment,” Weinberg told an audience at a March 16 reception for her first photography exhibition, which is currently on display at the Bergen County YJCC’s Atrium Gallery in Township of Washington.
Weinberg began catching and collecting moments back in high school. Apart from a photography course in college and a few workshops here and there, Weinberg was largely self-taught, taking pictures as preparations for her watercolor paintings and by snapping candid shots at weddings, bar mitzvahs and sporting events. She documented the childhoods of, first, her nephews and, later, her own children. She took her camera on vacations and, as the years passed, found herself coming home with more than just photos of famous places.
Her photos captured faces: faces of those she knew and, just as often, faces of strangers.
In the summer of 2006, Weinberg flew to with her “world traveler mother,” a fellow photographer who demonstrated her adventurous spirit on the day Weinberg’s exhibition opened; she was on a flight headed for
Dubai as Weinberg spoke: “She gave me the courage to take pictures.”
But not, Weinberg notes, the courage to interact directly with her subjects.
|
|
|
“Arbah Chamesh!,”
|
To get up close and personal with her subjects, Weinberg’s mother takes handfuls of balloons and hands them out to children in exotic locales such as and .
“There is pure delight in their faces,” says Weinberg with admiration. “She sets up a moment and catches it. I’d be off to the side taking a picture of her.”
Looking at Weinberg’s pictures, it is hard to believe that she photographs subjects from “off to the side.” She captures portraits during seemingly intimate moments.
But Weinberg explains that the portraits would not look the same if she got too close and let her subjects know what she was up to. Instead, she takes advantage of an enormous lens that she jokes is like her third child.
“I don’t feel like I’m imposing,” she says. “One of the things that works for me is I really zoom in a lot. It makes a much larger impact.”
After one week in , she had a series of photographs that included postcard quality shots of
Machu Picchu as well as portraits of Peruvians, many in traditional folk dress. When she first arrived, Weinberg photographed a woman in costume. The woman posed, then put out her hand for money in exchange for her service, a marketing gimmick that is both transportive for tourists seeking pictures of an ancient culture and lucrative for the costumed models. Weinberg paid, but from then on sought out candid shots, using her zoom lens to infiltrate private moments.
“The photos at that point were still just for me,” she says. Weinberg painted watercolors based on the pictures, which were displayed at the River Vale Library last year in an exhibition called “Fabric of Peru.”
Still, Weinberg’s friends would ask to see the photographed originals and their encouragement planted that “the seed for exhibiting.” Her photography exhibition at the Atrium Gallery, entitled “People and the Marketplace: and ,” juxtaposes images from her two most recent trips. While South America and the
Middle East are separated by thousands of miles, she found common ground in the everyday.
“It started with a concept of people, colors and material,” Weinberg says. “I found that I could match to .”
Among the 12 images from Peru and 13 from Israel that are on display, one finds a smiling female soldier with Israel’s Wailing Wall fuzzy and indiscernible in the background hung next to a bright image of a Peruvian child slung over her mother’s back. Rainbow-hued peppers are blown up, consuming the entire frame, creating the impression that they will fall through and roll onto the floor. Necklaces dangle against colorful scarves, like pillars leading the way to a vibrant sunset.
“Face against face. Food against food. It really was a contrast and connection… I like that,” Weinberg says with a giggle after a moment’s pause, demonstrating that she, too, is trying to make sense of her own work. “Contrast and connection.”
Weinberg’s photographs are on display with oil paintings by Alex Katseneligboigen of Cliffside Park and Liron Sissman of
Park Ridge . The exhibition is on display through April 13 at the Bergen County YJCC, located at 605 Pascack Road in
Township of
Washington . For more information, contact Jill Brown at 201-666-6610 ext. 222 or jbrown@yjcc.org.
Maggie Fazeli Fard's e-mail address is fazelifard@northjersey.com.
[ back ]
