Kate Taylor finds the hit of the Volta fair:

One of the hits of Volta so far is an exhibition of photographs by Rina Castelnuovo, a photographer for the New York Times in Israel. The dealer Andrew Meislin met her years ago when she was living in Israel. “I thought she was amazing, but she said, ‘I’m not an artist,'” Meislin said. So for the last several years Meislin has sold her work when requests come in from people who have seen it in the Times, but she hasn’t promoted or exhibited it. But the curators of Volta asked her to bring it to the fair, and Castelnuovo agreed (though she declined to come to New York herself to oversee the printing or installation).

Instead of framing the pictures, which show scenes like the funeral of an Israeli soldier killed in Gaza, or a pair of Arab Israeli boys playing in a trash dump, Meislin simply tacked them up on the walls of her booth.

“I wanted people to know they were journalism,” she said. “I didn’t want them to look precious.”

She said she had sold 10 or 12 pictures already (they range in price from $1500 to $3800, depending on the size), and that she had a lot of interest from museum curators, who want to include Castelnuovo’s work in exhibitions. One of the most beautiful pictures is from 2005, before the settlements in Gaza were evacuated. A bride in her wedding dress is approaching a tank, asking them to stop shooting for a few minutes so that she can have a quiet wedding ceremony. A prayer for peace that most likely wasn’t answered.