TIME's LightBox: Oded Balilty

Photo © Oded Balilty/AP-Courtesy Time LightBox

“If I see photographers in one corner, I go away. There is no need to take the same picture as five other good photographers." -Oded Balilty

It's no surprise to me that TIME LightBox is, in my estimation, one of the most exciting and interesting photojournalism blogs out there.

It recently featured Oded Balilty's The Art of Storytelling which consists of 35 wonderfully composed photographs of the Jewish ultra orthodox communities, which includes a series on a traditional Hasidic Jewish wedding, as a funeral of a leading rabbis. and the preparations for Passover.

I especially liked this photograph of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathering for the burial of a rabbi in Israel. It's very clever how Oded bisected the scene into two parts; the crowd surrounding the gravesite, and the solitary man presumably on his way to attend the burial.

Oded Balilty is a photographer for the Associated Press, is based in Tel Aviv and describes his work as something between art photography and photojournalism. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography in 2007 for his photograph of a solitary Jewish woman struggling to defy Israeli security forces in the West Bank.