Tara Israel is a photojournalist and portrait photographer based in New York City. Born and raised among both the generations of local fishermen and the seasonal Manhattanites of East Hampton, her work is equally a product of folkloric storytelling and cosmopolitan intellectualism. After studying photography under Joel Sternfeld and Accra Shepp at Sarah Lawrence College, she embraced the beauty in creating simple and honest images. Captured on the same Nikon 35mm camera her parents gave her when she was ten, Tara’s photographs are unpretentious, straightforward and comfortingly familiar. Her work regularly appears in the New York Times and Dossier Journal. Her most recent project, (a)Bonac, a photo essay about her hometown, has been profiled in the New York Times and Dan’s Papers and will be exhibited in New York in the winter of 2011.