TITLE: Manarola Nativity Scene

It was during a brief visit to the small village of Manarola, nestled in the heart of the Cinque Terre region of Italy, that I stopped in my tracks as I spotted a magnificent view of a steep hill, dotted with hundreds of sculpted human figures, engaged in some form of a religious activity. It was only in retrospect that I found out that I chanced upon the famous Manarola Nativity Scene. This inspiring project is the brainchild of Mario Andreoli, a local railway worker, who began his artistic venture in 1961 to commemorate his father.

Andreoli devoted 30 years of his life to create this colossal and and awesome hillside monument, using iron and recycled materials to tell the story of the birth of Christ. The Manarola Nativity Scene comes to life every year, on December 8th, when the entire hill is illuminated by 17,000 bulbs and 8 km of electrical cables - a Guinness record.

During an eureka moment, I decided "to switch off the lights", so to speak, and to transform this daytime photo into a stark, monochrome night scene. In its black and white version the figures toiling the ground and climbing up the hill stand out vividly against the dark and forbidding environment. Andreoli's singular project acquires - so I hope - a surreal, mystifying and fantastic aura while still honoring the environmental artist's original purpose: to portray man's gruelling and age-old struggle to reach a higher moral and spiritual level and to obtain redemption.

I submit this photo, in its black and white incarnation, to illustrate how - by stripping a popular site to its essence - one can highlight its clean lines, shapes and ambiance, and to pay homage to man's immense resilience, ingenuity and idealism despite a harsh and often disheartening predicament.

AUTHOR: Fredi Gruber (Israel)

I was handed my first camera ( a Zorky 4) at the age of ten. A private camera was rather rare in the blue-collar neughborhood where I was growing up. Many of my classmates' photos of themselves in early childhood were taken by my camera. The experience of documents the environment surrounding me may have instilled a desire to document life as a journalist. In 1972 I travelled to the United States to study TV Production at Boston University and then worked for 31 years as a documentary film maker for Israel's Public Television. Crisscrossing the country with a film crew, I often took my stills camera with me to capture people, landscapes and wildlife I chanced upon during a busy work day.
Many of my stories focused to environmental topics, alerting the public to the need to protect and preserve out planet. A photo of two fox cubs hiding in a tunnel near a busy coastal beach in Northern Tel Aviv was published last year in the Guardian.