LOCAL TESTIMONY 2013

Dana Wohlfeiler-Lalkin, initiator and manager of Local Testimony

Local Testimony is an annual press and documentary photography exhibition which has been held in Israel since 2003 alongside the international World Press Photo exhibition. Local Testimony provides a stage for the cultural qualities created by the photographers, concretizing the social importance of local documentation. This type of photography reveals the human and complex side of our existence which is not fully exposed in the conventional media.

This year Local Testimony marks its tenth anniversary. The exhibit comprises photographs selected by the jury, and a

special exhibit which presents photographs displayed in Local Testimony over the past decade. These important photos underscore the iconic part photography plays in key historic moments, and the special role of photographers in creating an original language of documentary photography.

Reviewing the numerous photographs in our archives collection evokes memories mixed with a sense of repeating recollections. The photo of Ariel Sharon sitting alone in the museum, the photographs documenting the disengagement, the Occupation, the Second Lebanon War, fighting in the Gaza Strip and the social protest - all heighten awareness to the fact that everything remains static - local testimony to a ticking regional reality.

Since I founded the exhibition and over the years the changing names of photographers in the exhibition and their increasing absence from the press and media publications is notable. There is a sense that this is not merely an evolutionary issue.

I always saw a dimension of calling and activism in photojournalism and documentary photography, a profession which goes far beyond merely making a living, or as Robert Frank so aptly puts it, “Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference.” I follow the existential reality of the field of documentary photography with interest and concern, and seek, together with the exhibition’s editorial board, new ways to reinforce its creators.

As of 2009, Local Testimony has found apermanent home and a faithful partner with the Eretz Israel Museum, Tel-Aviv.

In addition to the annual exhibition, Local Testimony develops theoretical programs that bring artists together in joint workshops. Frames of Reality, a workshop designated for Israeli and Palestinian press and documentary

photographers, was designed to enhance the capacity of editing, writing, and personal expression of the photographed story.

Last year Local Testimony’s editorial board, together with the Eretz Israel Museum, has developed and produced the Nature Picture exhibition, an annual exhibition of the best nature photographs by Israeli photographers exhibited alongside the Wild Life Photographer of the Year exhibition of the Museum of Natural History in London.

Every year the editorial board of Local Testimony renews and updates all aspects of the exhibition’s production. The jury and curators change every two years in order to offer different angles of viewing when selecting the winning

photographs. 

I would like to thank the jury for its faithful and complex work in Local Testimony 2013. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the editorial board, the curators over the years, and particularly the photographers who submit their work year after year. Without you these exhibits would not have been possible.

SNAP MY PHOTO AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF WORDS ALREADY SAID

Moran Shoub, Local testimony 2013 curator

Like destruction a photograph is constant under all the coverings, waiting to be revisited. Viewing the photographs takes us back in time to the stories that remained open, like wounds, and to the ruins before they were buried. Time covers ruins, but severing it by a photograph exposes a vacuum and realities that remained unchanged and in ruins.

In the exhibition space walls surround us on all sides, walls, walls and no ceiling; what do you think the space resembles? A building site? The ruins of a demolished building? 

In poem 42 in Yehuda Amichai’s Cycle of Quatrains, the narrator asks to have his photograph taken against the backdrop of the ruins that remained after the war “Snap my photo in the dunes next to the broken tank/Snaps my photo against the backgrop of words already said/ Words that will never be uttered again/ Without hope like the fireworks’ glow…”The fireworks, promising for a moment and then extinguished, resemble a flash that lights up the scene of events, makes the moment of photography possible, and is then blown out. The photograph that immortalizes the time and space of destruction does not offer any future, but forever anticipates destruction. The 10th anniversary of Local Testimony and the thousands of years of this land’s existence attest to the fact that the war over a home, in the simple sense of the word, in the sense of an aspiration and the right to a place to live – wins all. It is not the right to a respectful life that wins, but rather war.

Look at the figures photographed against the background of damaged walls; look at the little girl raising her head toward the ceiling of her bombed home – the distress on the faces of the subjects in the photograph from last year or from fifteen or a hundred years ago - it does not become a routine matter if it is well expressed in the photograph;

time will not blot out the pain of the little girl whose home was demolished. But her photograph, like a city covered in heaps of rubble that mark her past, may illustrate countless situations: destruction, war, terror. “The photograph is the greatest deceiver of culture,” wrote Adam Baruch; the photograph invites interpretations that deny the intention of the original (a photograph of family happiness may be termed the documentation of quiet horror). In other

words, the photograph of the little girl against the background of her demolished home no longer represents a specific child but rather immortalizes the ruins, and therefore, because it does not represent but immortalizes - the method of winners and losers triumphs.

If only we could realize our right notto compete with one another, not to be calculating. Not to destroy. Not to argue.