Facing the "incident"

Leah Abir, Curator of Local Testimony 2022

Local Testimony is an exhibition that every year freezes time for a while: it gathers in one space significant moments from the year gone by, as documented by local lenses, and lets us take a deep look at the images. We might have already seen some of these pictures, or think we have, but now we are seeing them in depth, outside the stream of images constantly flicking past our eyes. Now we can face the “incident” - as military language and the newscasts following in its footsteps describe any newsworthy event - for long enough that it can dissolve, solidify, echo and connect to other “incidents”. This time we do not need to formulate a position relating to it, but can observe its components and the system it is a part of. We can understand, we can communicate, we can experience the complexity of opinion and emotion.

Itai Ron’s Photo of the Year encapsulates all the features and meanings of one of the year’s most important events. Not a military operation, a war, a violent demonstration or the collapse of a government: the funeral of Rabbi Kanievsky, who was considered to be one of the greatest rabbis alive. Hundreds of thousands of people saw him as a spiritual leader, and it was they who took part in the ceremony and made it into a historic event. Everybody in the country felt the reverberations of the funeral procession: thousands of police and paramedics were alerted; main roads were blocked; and all the media channels covered it live. The huge crowds provoked concerns in the wake of the fresh trauma of the worst civilian disaster in the history of the state, which occurred only a year previously at the annual festivities in memory of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. Itai Ron’s photo does not focus on the tempting aesthetic of the crowd, or on the anonymous press of black and white. Instead, we are invited to witness spectators in an improvised gallery, caught in the moment as they strain to watch the event without losing their balance, after swarming up the trees like impetuous children instead of submitting to the roadblocks and the crowd management. At the same time one of the figures in the photograph is looking back at us and inviting us in - we who were ordered to keep away from the event and are far from understanding it.

This photo, like all the photos in the exhibition, was selected in a process including many participants and opinions, a process steered by commitment to the professional community surrounding Local Testimony and the large audiences that visit it every year, as well as to a democratic and liberal agenda. Apart from the involvement with current events, a language of civilian, popular photography has grown up around the exhibition, a grass roots language that gives us new frameworks to view what took place, without following the dictation of the banner

headlines and special broadcasts; a language aware of history and concerned with the future, that grants us a slightly different narrative and understanding of what is happening to us and around us.