Anat Saragusti, curator of Local Testimony 2023

A good photograph is judged for its capacity to stand on its own and tell a story with no need for explanation or extra words, and for its ability to convey an emotion and a message even years after the recorded event. Good and powerful photographs are carved into the collective consciousness and go on “speaking” for years after they were taken.

Nevertheless, there are few photographs that depict the thing itself, the event from the news, the immediate spontaneous happening. Sometimes photographers are present at an event and succeed in recording the moment of breakdown or disruption, but these are the exceptions. This is especially true of security events: terror attacks, clashes between civilians, confrontations between police and civilians (not demonstrations covered by journalists) and, of course, military operations and wars.

It rarely happens that photographers succeed in capturing the moment. That moment captured by Robert Capa when he immortalized a soldier hit by a fatal bullet in the Spanish Civil War. Most photographers document what happens afterwards, the consequences of the event.

As a journalist, it was important to me to open the exhibition with a selection of the principal events: the pro-democracy demonstrations, violence in the West Bank, crime in the Arab sector, the Israeli-Ethiopian community’s protests, tension on the sports field, and of course the war in Gaza.

At the same time, Local Testimony 2023 is based on three foundations: the war that broke out on October 7th, the struggle for democracy, and the escalating conflict between settlers and Palestinians. The events of the war are narrated by almost 300 pictures taken during the first two weeks. Most of the pictures from the Gaza envelope record the results of the massacre and the brutal raid: funerals of murdered families, destroyed houses, burnt-out cars, debris from the party. The pictures immortalize the missing: what “isn’t there”, and trigger the horrors of the imagination.

So too with the clashes between settlers and Palestinians. The chosen photos are quiet and calm. But there is a dissonance behind the silence – a fraught existence and mounting violence. Most of the photos do not document the clashes themselves: the awful acts of terrorism, the demolitions or the building and construction, the appropriation, but this absence testifies to high drama.

The images of the protest, on the other hand, are full of action: water cannons, arrests, violent clashes between demonstrators and police, road blocks, blazing fires. In fact, most of the prodemocracy demonstrations were polite, quiet, orderly and non-violent. But the pictures chosen for the exhibition depict stormy and dramatic happenings, because pictures of quiet demonstrations are mostly uninteresting and unexciting. The selection reflects a stimulation threshold in search of the dramatic and the stormy even at the cost of a distorted picture of reality.