Tel Aviv

Built up on sand dunes just over one hundred years ago, its tolerance has become world famous. Religion, way of life and sexual desires are free to be expressed as wished. Impatiently bustling with creativity and forever looking ahead; it refuses to stagnate. Nervously looking around, eager not to miss out; it constantly evolves and charges forward. Too busy to sleep means always on the ready, but also that there’s a time for everyone.

These photos were all taken December 2019 – January 2020 and portraits the city and its people as I know them. Beautiful, ugly, intelligent, sexy and mad. Far from perfect, encouragingly human and liberatingly informal. There’s simply no other place like it.

Some names have been changed. This blog post should be viewed on a big screen.

Back in the nineties, I lived for a year in a hostel just by where the above picture is taken. It was me, Adam from Cambridge, Rich from Essex, Andreas from Norway, Mat from South Africa and several more. For £3 per hour, sometimes £4, we worked in removing, carrying boxes, equipment and fridge freezers. Once we were on a job out in the desert, 2 hours drive away or more. There was no space in the front of the truck so I had to be in the back in the dark on a blanket on the metal floor. All while my friends in the front were eating, drinking and getting stoned. It was a hard life, quarter of a century before the gig economy, and I loved it. Maybe that’s why I still work like I do, without any safety belt, in London’s wild west agency nursing-world. I like it that way. Makes me feel alive.

In a house behind the traffic lights and to the left of the trees in the picture above, there used to be the ‘Home hostel.’ A South African guy I knew made a move up and became its manager. Suddenly he was all legal with a proper work visa and all sorts and we, his old mates from Old Jaffa hostel down in Yafo in the southern part of town, marvelled at his good fortune. But Matthew had a troubled side. He told me about how his dad, back in the South African eighties, used to take him along to the pub and leave him alone in the car as the dad went in to drink and watch the cricket. Every so often the barman would come out with Coke and crisps for little Mat, who subsequently grew rather not very little at all and stayed that way. “Fat Mat” we used to call him. “If you come down to South Africa, David” he used to tell me, “and beat my old man up; I’ll give you good money!”

Mat liked his drink. I suppose we all did, but Mat maybe even more. His new career came to an abrupt end when he beat, punched and kicked a skinny English lad the four stairs down from the hostel bar, out on the street and then continued beating the unfortunate fella up against the wall. It didn’t end pretty. Mat was ugly, fat and had this unappealing habit, especially when you lived in the same room as him, of always scratching his balls. “Because it’s such a beauty!” he used to answer with a thick Afrikaans accent when I asked why he always had his hands down his pants.

Strange thing is, I remember him with a slight fondness.

You can always do something. Try to move a little bit further ahead. Improve. In Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, there’s a chess game, painstakingly assembled inside one of the death camps, somehow constructed by pieces of folded paper . The queens, kings, bishops, knights and rooks are all there, easily distinguishable, rising above the others in survival triumph.

The picture above is taken close to the the old bus station, an area plagued by hard drugs, prostitution and crime. This woman had been dragging her bag along on the ground with impressive determination. Finally she sat down and started going through it obsessively. Behind her is another woman with a baby on her back going through a small crowd of crack smoking junkies. I know because I just passed them. I took my camera up as one of the women inhaled desperately in a pipe, her feet moving manically up and down on the spot, like the wandering Jew from the anti semitic legend who’s cursed to life-long moving around, but unlike him, this woman, despite her restless feet, seemed completely stuck and not able to move away from the path of self-destruction. As I fingered with my camera these zombie creatures, numbed but with wide open eyes of crack-madness, stretched out their arms towards me and my camera like something from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I decided I’d better be on my way.

Opposite the doors above there’s “Old Yafo” by Yafo port from where the famous Jaffa oranges were shipped to Europe. There, I used to wash the dishes and do some cleaning in a bar called ‘B-square.’ The pay was NIS 12 an hour, that’s £2.64. It was located in a basement and somehow the place seemed wet. The air was humid and sticky and there was always water on the floor. It must have been some trouble with the electricity supply because there were extension cables all over the place. The chef was a nice man called Moshe. He tried to teach me how to prepare the lettuce, the hassa. You were not supposed to chop it with a knife, but kind of tear it with your fingers. It didn’t look difficult and I set off, tearing up the evenings supply of lettuces. “David, you killed the hassa!” exclaimed Moshe angrily as he came back to examine my job. After that, I had to stick to the dishes. “But be careful!” Moshe said and thoroughly instructed me to stay away from leads and cables. It turned out the previous dish washer had died just weeks before, electrocuted at work.

An Israeli man, older and wiser than me, told me that he thought the reason there are relatively few fancy cars about comparing to, say, London probably has to do with the cars in Israel being so much more expensive than in Europe. With Tel Aviv being one of the costliest cities in the world, it simply makes German cars unaffordable for many. Hm, maybe. But in dusty Bethlehem, a stone throw from Jerusalem but firmly within the Occupied Territories, the cars are imported from Israel and dearer still. Despite this, there were a fair amount of BMW’s and Merc’s about, driving insanely on the badly maintained and rubbish cluttered roads…