LOCAL TESTIMONY 2019

Dana Wohlfeiler-Lalkin, Founder and Director of Local Testimony

Local Testimony, the annual exhibition of photo-journalism and documentary photography, has been held in Israel since 2003, alongside the international photo-journalism exhibition World Press Photo. Local Testimony grants a platform to local documentary photography, expresses its cultural qualities and demonstrates its social significance; this is professional photography that displays the complex aspects of the regional situation, which do not always receive sufficient exposure in the popular media.

Alongside images documenting the prominent events this year - the tempestuous election campaigns and the Ethiopian community’s protests - many of the images in Local Testimony 2019 seem to be evidence of a burning issue of another kind: global warming, a world-wide process advancing at an unprecedented rate. The works dealing with this issue from a local angle are exceptionally powerful and comprehensive. Whether or not the photographers were motivated by a commitment to raise awareness of the issue, we, the viewers, understand the context. The climate crisis is totally with us.

Eyal Fried’s superb Series of the Year and Doron Nissim's moving series of landscapes document human influence on the environment; Alexander Bronfer’s poetic Dead Sea series reminds us of the threatened disappearance of this unique natural treasure. Alongside these works appear other more “practical” images, such as Bea Bar Kallos’ straightforward work presenting a situation where plastic has become a threatening force. And finally, Yasmin Lahav’s lyrical series skillfully and sensitively displaying the plants that she collected in the forest near her house, which according to forecasts of the climate crisis is liable to disappear, or at the very least undergo a significant transformation.

Like a seismograph recording and documenting the strength and location of an earthquake, in this exhibition the documentary photographers depict for us the movements and transformations taking place beneath the surface. These are environmental, social, and other processes caused by changing reality.

I would like to thank the photographers for their important and excellent work, and the jury for the complex efforts at every stage of the judging process from the first steps to the fascinating final discussion when selecting the photographs to be included in the exhibition. The exhibition is here due to your loyalty and hard work.

TESTIMON, ART, AND WHAT'S IN BETWEEN 

Eldad Rafaeli, curator of Local Testimony 2019

Over the years the Local Testimony exhibitions have proclaimed their commitment to ethical values side-by-side with aesthetic codes of documentation and investigation.

The contemporary age has brought about a change: the central communications media have ceased to be the principal source of authority mediating reality, and the smartphone has conquered the world. Today the masses are the ones documenting reality, and at the same time the heroes of the story. We live in a world where there is no longer a single central reported truth. “Fake news” is back in the headlines. 

These changes have compelled photographers to go back to where they started from and ask: Is there a single reality? A single truth? These questions seem to have led photo-journalists to redefine their role: from agents mediating reality to photo-artists expressing a human, principled, social, aesthetic, political and investigative stance.

Hundreds of photographers submitted thousands of images to the contest. In curating the exhibition I have tried to create a new narrative based on the jury’s selections, moving from documentary to artistic viewpoints and making connections between them; a kind of axis forming a link between the outstanding works by the 71 photographers selected to participate in the exhibition. This narrative reflects a complex reality while at the same time provoking thought about this new field - the domain on the borderline between photo-journalism and art - a domain formed by the interpretation of each photographer and artist participating in the Local Testimony exhibition. The artistic approach expands and refines the discussion about truth and time. The contexts of the different works and their interconnections reflect a level-headed, personal, profound and creative look at Israel in 2019.

Uri Gershuni, photographer, artist, and lecturer
Tomer Heymann, documentary author and director
Ilan Itzhayek, editor-in-chief of Yedioth Ahronoth’s Xnet website
Vardi Kahana, photographer, curator and member of the Local Testimony editorial board
Uriel Sinai, photographer and documentary film director
Rina Castelnuovo, photo-journalist and director
Guy Raz, photographer and photography curator of Muza - Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv
Etty Schwartz, photographer, curator and lecturer