Two Israeli Fashion Photographers Recast Masculinity Through Intimate Male Portraits

Photographer Shay Cohen Arbel and photographer, writer and art director Anchal Hai Arbiv are showing bodies of work at the Tri-Color art and design fair, opening this week at the Kremenitsky Technology Center in Tel Aviv from June 24 to 29. Both artists use fashion photography to question Israeli masculinity, while blending commercial imagery with more artistic, staged portraits.

Cohen Arbel, 39, a former model agent who works in commercial photography and creative work, is presenting his series "Below," built around men photographed in the liminal spaces around residential buildings, such as entrances and other everyday public thresholds. He says the project grew out of a personal attraction to places people usually ignore. Raised in Holon and now living in Jaffa, he describes those settings as romantic and nostalgic, reminding him of the home where he grew up. His subjects include models such as Nikita Sklyarov and Alen Godin, alongside other men who fit a narrow masculine ideal but are far from the average Israeli male image.

Arbiv, 37, is showing a sequence that spans his studies at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, commercial assignments, and new work begun after the war broke out on October 7, following the death of his uncle, Aaron Uri Perash, in the attack on the Urim base. He says his starting point was his own childhood as a shy gay boy in Pardes Hanna, and that his work seeks a "new look at what it means to be a man, how it is okay to be a man, how to look at a man properly." He adds that in the United States and Europe there is more room for softness and femininity than in Israel.

Both photographers return to the model Vova, whose images carry overt emotional and symbolic weight. Cohen Arbel says he keeps photographing Vova to see how he changes and how their relationship develops, while Arbiv uses him in a famous image with a goldfish in a water-filled plastic bag and the years 1995 to 2016 tattooed on his chest. Together, the two bodies of work challenge the macho Israeli male stereotype and argue for vulnerability, desire and identity as central parts of male representation.