AMIR LAVON – THE STREETS OF EVERYWHERE

by Kay Ziv
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©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved

The story of the ‘streets of everywhere’ is about the life of the simple man, in every place, every country and in every corner.
SIMPLICITY.
It’s the story of the common people in simple situations; most of them live in a simple town and have a simple life.
They wake up every morning doing their best to pass another day in the ‘streets of everywhere’.
Most of them are just shadows looking for identity, looking for life in a dying world.
It’s the story of the simple man looking for love in a world of money and cash, walking down the streets to the place I call ‘everywhere’.
I live my life on these streets looking at them with my lens, they are in a search for the meaning of life, And I’m doing whatever I can. I capture their image, for creating a memory and expose their existence.
I don’t know where you are,
I want to give you an identity.

©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved
©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved

ORPHANS OF LIFE

At the beginning of the 21st century, some 100 million homeless people lived in the world. Some see the term “homeless” as a term that is not exclusively based on the problem of homelessness, but also contains important emotional, social, and psychological components.
The homeless phenomenon in Israel is a relatively new phenomenon, known only since the early 1990s in large cities in Israel. While in the early 1990s, a few dozen homeless people were identified in Tel Aviv, in 2003 there were almost a thousand people. In 2006, about 3,000 street dwellers were recognized for welfare services in local authorities. As of 2007, the unit treats street dwellers in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality with about 750 street dwellers.

A closer look at these figures distinguishes people who are powerless and whose eyes are glazed and detached. They are medically neglected, dressed in rags, and some are addicted to psychoactive substances (drugs and alcohol). Most of them are helpless and unable to cope. They suffer from social isolation and paranoid, emotionally isolated, unemployable, hopeless, and hopeless suspicions. Some also suffer from personality disorders or mental illness. The combination of these reasons, in whole or in part, forces them to the margins of society and causes them to be removed from the course of normative life..

©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved
©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved

ON THE MATTRESS THEY WILL FIND IT

According to various estimates, hundreds of street dwellers. Those dear people, whose fate is not much better, are transparent to the system. In a good case, they will receive little food and drink and some heat when they wish to be evacuated to the emergency room. In the worst case, they will find their death on the street.
In the city, there are merchants who help the street people, from their own pockets. They take them to shower, donate them new clothes and give them a hot drink at night.
 A homeless man, tired of the cold night, fell asleep under the warm sun in the pedestrian mall. “There are many more like him, they do not look at them, they’re like potted plants,” says a merchant in the city. Many homeless people lost all their property and had no way of rehabilitating their lives. They have no option, for example, to work or rent an apartment. For many years, various social organizers have been demanding a framework to take care of the street, or at least offer them initial aid.
In the current economic situation, each one of us can turn into a street runner. Among those who lost everything were those who were army officers, or senior managers.

©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved
©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved

ON THE MATTRESS IN THE PUBLIC SPACE MASS FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPHS

I’ve never seen anyone leave a bed in the street. We never see who is going out with a mattress from the house to the street, and throws him there. We also do not see who collects them. They’re just there until they do not. Watching a tree or wall or lying to themselves. Sometimes they flow from the sidewalk to the road. They have no place in the garbage cans. There is no tin to hold a mattress. The public space is their garbage can until they are taken away.
Sometimes we see the garbage truck boys pulling a mattress together and pushing it effortlessly into its container.
The mattresses, which are imposed on the public space, brutally and mercilessly mark the basic right to shelter. People, with their personal belongings (refugees, homeless, or evacuees) are thrown out into the street and abandoned in the public sphere. There is always, among the objects lying in the heap, the mattress.

The mattress is the modest private space in which each one of us, at home, allows his body to gather strength. None of us, unless he is homeless, unless he is a refugee, does not sleep outside in the street. When an object is thrown into the street when a person, when an entire family is thrown into the street, has no shelter. Anyone who has never been forced to sleep without shelter may not have thought of the basic right of everyone to shelter.

©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved
©Amir Lavon. All Rights Reserved

AMIR LAVON

“The main thing for me is that I’m glad that I’ve been able to work as a professional photographer. What is at the heart of my work is, in essence, a meditation on being a human being”.

Amir Lavon was born in the Israel and studied photography at the PCK of Fine and media Arts, graduating in 2005. In 2014 he received his BFA at Ohalo College. At the Moma Art School of art and curating, he studied curating and collecting photography, urban photography, and all the main aspects of the field.

Amir began photographing as a freelancer in 2005. His work from Israel, Europe and other countries attracted the attention of many magazines in 2005-2018.
He was nominated to the agency SSP press in the summer of 2018, and became a full member in 2005.

Amir’s worked on assignment for such publications as National Geographic, Index, Lens Magazine, Head-on, ND, Newsmedia, Private Times, The Fine Eye, SSP press, CIRCLE, SHOOT THE FRAME Magazine, galleries and, museums around the world.


Read the full article on Lens Magazine Issue #52

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