One Shot: NYT's Rina Castelnuovo

Photo © Rina Castelnuovo-All Rights Reserved
The New York Times' Lens blog features the work of Rina Castelnuovo in Palestine & Israel. Essentially a "smooch" job by the writer, but there's no denying that she deserves every word of it.

After all, she's the photographer who captured the infamous photograph of the thuggish Israeli settler tossing wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron.

Amongst Ms Castelnuovo's photographs on the Lens blog, I chose the one above as my favorite. The photograph is of a group of Haredi Jews (or Haredim) during a festival in the Mea Shearim district of Jerusalem. The Haredim are Ultra-Orthodox Jews who consider their belief system and rituals to extend in an unbroken chain back to Moses.

I'm intrigued by some of the hats worn by these Haredim. The fur hats worn by some are called spodik while the flat ones are called shtreimel, however I can't figure those worn by the fellows on the left of the photograph which resemble white fezzes complete with black tassels.

The fez of course, is the well-known red hat with tassel of the Ottoman Empire, which was popular in its dominions such as Egypt, the Maghreb and some Greek islands. The fez was banned by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as being regressive.

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One Shot: Arun Bhat

Photo ©Arun Bhat-All Rights Reserved.
Arun Bhat is a travel photographer and writer based in Bangalore. He has been traveling all over India for past five years, especially the mountain regions, photographing the country's diverse culture and landscapes. He's also the author of The Painted Stork travel blog, and rides a Royal Enfield Bullet Thunderbird motorcycle during his travels across India.

While on my Theyyams of Malabar photo-expedition, I came across Arun as we were photographing a Theyyam ceremony at the Trikannad Temple near Kasargode. He mentions our encounter here, where you will find many more of his well composed images of the Theyyam. He captioned the above image of the Theyyam as practicing the raudra rasa, or anger expression, by looking at his refection in a hand mirror. (The image is not as sharp as the original sent by Arun...that's because I had to enlarge a bit for the blog).

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One Shot: Fabiano Busdraghi

Photo ©Fabiano Busdraghi-All Rights Reserved.
I haven't posted a One Shot feature in quite a while, and Fabiano's work in Antarctica seemed just right for it.

Fabiano Busdraghi is a Milan-born Italian photographer. He has a master in Physics at the University of Pisa, and another in Oceanography and Meteorology at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris where he now lives and works. He recently took photography and writing as his full time occupation, traveling to various remore areas of the world including Antarctica.

Fabiano's photographic works range from travel, reportage and more artistic and personal work. He works in digital and traditional photography, and has been using alternative techniques, such as palladium and platinum, gum bichromate, cyanotype, Van Dyke Brown, and carbon prints.

His main website is here.

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One Shot: Aloha Diao Lavina: Bali

Photo ©Aloha Diao Lavina-All Rights Reserved
Aloha Diao Lavina's photographs have been featured in Estamos! a lifestyle magazine in Ecuador, in an illustrated poetry book in the US, and various online magazines including Utata Tribal Photography. She won second place in the Betterphoto contest, and is a fellow of the Bangkok Photographic Society, and a featured photographer of Fotegrafik, an image bank in Singapore.

Aloha, apart from being a multi-faceted photographer, is also a doctoral student researching the interaction of culture and creativity in children.

From her many excellent galleries, I chose the above photograph for the One Shot feature, and it's from her Eye on Bali. Her travel galleries include Myanmar, Rajasthan, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos.

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One Shot: Peter Bendheim: Sangoma

Photo ©Peter Bendheim-All Rights Reserved
Peter Bendheim is a documentary photographer in Durban, South Africa. He's represented by africapictures.net and his work is part of the permanent collection of the Durban Art Gallery, and his documentary work was exhibited in various galleries to include on the Digital Journalist website.

Peter's favorite photographers are Sebastiao Salgado, W. Eugene Smith, Gary Winogrand and Martin Parr. His favorite camera equipment is Nikon, and is the editor and principal photographer of MetroBeat, a full color magazine of 400,000 copies in circulation. He also worked with the National Geographic Traveler magazine on a specific assignment.

I chose his portrait of sangomas for this post. Sangomas are practitioners of herbal medicine, divination and counseling in traditional the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and Swazi societies of Southern Africa. The practice is based on a belief in ancestral spirits.

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