Realities of Life
Realities of Life is a half year long project, covering the true realities of a daily life in Israel from missile attacks on the southern Israeli cities of Beer Sheva, Sderot, Ashqelon and Ashdod among others, where Yan have resided at the time when he decided to do this project.
The idea started from the missile attack that Yan have heard while on a train back to Ashdod from Tel-Aviv, the explosion happened not to far from a very populated shopping plaza, Yan rushed to the location and took these shots of a police investigating the explosion and happen to capture person crying on officer's shoulder, who must have been passing by the area where the missile landed.
While the project begun from that specific explosion, it carried Yan to unexpected areas of life... meeting and photographing homeless living on the streets of Tel-Aviv, alcoholics who immigrated to Israel for better life and ended up living from bottle to bottle, demonstrations across the country for better living conditions and affordable housing, and one final subject of 2011, the illegal refugees in Israel from Sudan.
The project turned out to be more successful than Yan have thought it would be, 25 photos of the entire project where exhibited in two solo exhibitions and several of the works were showcased at some joined exhibitions with other artists in the field of street and documentary photography.
Yan was invited to lecture on the subject of street & documentary photography in such known settings as Tel-Aviv University and Eretz Israel Museum (Israeli National Museum) among others.
Same year Yan have received Honorable Mention Award by Lucie Foundation International Photography Awards 2012 for one of the photos from this project.
All 25 photographs that traveled the country from exhibition to exhibition for a year, were donated by Yan to a none-profit organization that is helping none-jewish kids integrate within Israeli regular schools and jewish communities, at which Yan volunteered for 3 months teaching kids basics of photography and importance of expressing themselves through this unique medium.
