Eretz Israel Museum’s Wildlife Photo Exhibit Spotlights Global And Local Nature

We can’t wait to go see the gorgeous wildlife photos on display at the Eretz Israel Museum’s “Global Nature, Local Nature” exhibit. If you’ll be in Tel Aviv in the next few months, you can catch it too — the show opened on June 21 and runs through October 14.

This is actually two side-by-side exhibitions of wildlife photos, a format the museum has successfully used five previous times. The first is the international Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition on loan from the London Natural History Museum.

The local exhibition, “A Picture of Nature,” presents the unique wildlife of Israel and is supplemented by historical photographs documenting the plague of locusts that spread throughout the Middle East in 1915, disrupting the delicate relationships between humans and nature.

This year, more than 4,000 photographs were submitted to the competition by 410 photographers.

Sixty photographs and four video works were chosen in the following categories: Birds, Mammals, Humans and Nature, Abstract in Nature, Invertebrates, Reptiles and Amphibians, the Submarine World, Landscape Photography, Documentary and Youth Photographers.

Curator Guy Raz explains that Israel’s “unique geographical and climatic characteristics, in particular its open spaces and ecological corridors, are vital to the preservation of its biodiversity, which includes endangered animal and plant species.”

The entrance to “A Picture of Nature” features the installation “Slough” by Ori Shifrin-Anavi. The snake-like passageway, made from construction waste-removal sleeves, connects the two levels of the building housing the two displays.

An avocet lands in a winter puddle, during a chilly, overcast morning, against the backdrop of the sunrise on HaCarmel Beach Photo by Yosi Chen

In “Putting the Ocean First,” photographer Tom Schlesinger shows an endangered hawksbill turtle checking out an artificial reef, the Igloo, in the northern Red Sea.

Produced in association with ISRAEL21c