I attend a lot of exhibitions throughout the year. That’s a given in my line of work. But I’d be hard-pressed to think of an arts event that consistently attracts as much public interest as the press photography exhibition Local Testimony.
As I entered the display hall on the upper level of the Rothschild Center building at the Eretz Israel Museum in Ramat Aviv, I was immediately struck by the buzz of the place. There were scores of visitors of all ages viewing the photographs and video clips, talking about the content, or immersing themselves in a particular item. There was no ambiance of the hushed reverence you generally get at art repositories. This was a dynamic you don’t normally encounter in museums.
But this is par for the course for Local Testimony, the annual rollout of the pick of the photojournalism and documentary photography bunch from the previous year. Actually, “the year” does not run along calendar lines.
“We close the previous year on August 31,” explains Dana Wohlfeiler-Lalkin, who got the show up and running more than two decades ago, and is still at the helm. That said, ad-hoc curators come and go generally on a biennial basis, and this year’s rollout was overseen by Ilia Yefimovich, himself a seasoned documentary photographer and photojournalist who has pounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beat for some years now.
Yefimovich says he was keenly aware of his doubleheader role as photographer-cum-curator, particularly during the clash with Iran in June. He recalls that as he went about his hazardous work, with missiles from Iran raining down on Israel, he observed his professional colleagues “documenting the events unfolding in front of us, wondering how their images might weave together in the visual mosaic of this exhibition.” There’s nothing like on-the-job training…
Few events are as photogenic as war
By now, anyone who has attended a Local Testimony showing should know the drill. It is accepted wisdom in photographic circles that very few events are as photogenic as war. Sadly, as we are viscerally aware, that is an all too frequent occurrence in this part of the world, and it has been a constant in the Ramat Aviv museum lineup over the years.
The cataclysmic fallout of armed conflict rings out from all corners of the museum’s display hall, including from Gaza. The scale of damage in the Palestinian enclave comes across in no uncertain terms in a black-and-white frame of what looks like an enormous bomb site, taken by photographer Heidi Levine for The Washington Post. She snapped the aerial picture from a Royal Jordanian Air Force cargo plane that was delivering humanitarian aid to Gazans. There is no getting away from the fact that this is plain and simple decimation. The shot won the Curator’s Choice garland in the News category.
As death and destruction become the norm, and the never-ending cycle of violence is accepted as an unavoidable factor of life in this part of the world, we are all in danger of becoming, at least outwardly, inured to the pain and sorrow inflicted on ourselves and our neighbors.
Most of us are exposed to a constant barrage of images, faithfully and unstintingly delivered to our living rooms and computer and cellphone screens, by the various channels’ newsrooms as they each vie to outdo the competition in jaw-dropping offerings of fire, brimstone, and horrific scenes designed to leave us wide-eyed and with our nerves jangling.
With all her years of experience, Wohlfeiler-Lalkin is keen to the pitfalls of excess. “Over these years, we have deliberated long and hard about which photographs to show from the events of the war. We want to avoid slipping into pornography. We are all emotionally vulnerable, and there is the question about whether to show a picture of a body, or body parts. Last year, we decided not to show that.”
The potential exhibitors did not take too kindly to that move. “The photographers were very angry with us,” the chief curator notes.
A propos, in contrast to the 2024 event, this year’s exhibition includes works by Gazan photographers. How exactly that came about is hard to say, but it seems like a rare, positive regional development.
While some may balk at the seemingly crass catwalk presentation of woe and emotional turmoil, Wohlfeiler-Lalkin can point to at least one invaluable outcome of the annual press snapshot spread. “Last year, and also two years ago – two years ago the exhibition opened barely two months after Oct. 7 – many visitors said they felt it helps them achieve some kind of processing. They could suddenly view the complex images at such an emotionally tempestuous time.
“Many of them came from the immediate circle of people who had lost someone close to them. They were suddenly given an opportunity, in the museum hall, to stand in front of those images, quietly.”
The healing collateral, says Wohlfeiler-Lalkin, has been provided by practitioners from the field. “Quite a few therapists attended dialogue circles at the museum. They said they got a lot out of that.”
There are professionals from other areas who stand to gain from the Eretz Israel Museum venture. “We get many groups of youths coming to Local Testimony. It happens on quite a few mornings. That is very pleasing, as you see teachers who utilize the exhibition and the images to encourage discussion on a range of topics. That is far more efficient than the frontal classroom setting of teacher, students, and blackboard, which falls short of the mark. It can address creative thinking and all sorts of things that relate to civics, education, and diplomacy. I know there are a lot of teachers in those fields who take advantage of the exhibition.”
Wohlfeiler-Lalkin feels we can all get something out of Local Testimony and the arc of facets and themes displayed on the museum walls. “The most important thing, and the one thing I hope for most, is that we, as a society, remember how to conduct some kind of complex dialogue about issues that are subject to controversy.”
Between the doom and gloom, prints of flattened buildings and lives destroyed on both sides of the conflict, and distraught families and friends of those who suffered the most during the latest round of hostilities, there are some rays of light and hope.
One of the most emotive items in that category is a video by Inbar Zak called And to Love Life with a Broken Heart, which is a quote taken from the oeuvre of legendary Jerusalem poet Zelda. “If I had to give the exhibition a name, I would borrow that,” Wohlfeiler-Lalkin smiles. The chief curator is particularly taken with this work. Zak’s creation indeed provides a breath of healing fresh air, albeit with the odd flash of negative input. There are long shots of Mother Nature and her bountiful offerings, including flora and fauna and much more, with some jagged edges betwixt the tranquil pastoral stuff.
“It is mostly about nature, the cyclical form of nature. But there are flickers of wounded nature in there too,” Wohlfeiler-Lalkin says. “There are places where fires rage, a missile landing, or maybe a warplane or helicopter streaming across the sky.”
Zak deftly fused the latter with birds flying on high with insouciant ease. “It is a very tender and poetic work,” Wohlfeiler-Lalkin observes. “There is something comforting about it; but on the other hand, it does not forget [the regional circumstances].”
There are numerous exhibits that most of us will probably never forget. One that tugs heavily on the heartstrings and tear ducts is a video work by Sharon Aronowicz on behalf of the French news agency AFP. In it, we see an interview with Raja Khatib, an attorney who also serves as deputy chairman of the Haifa Bar Association. During the war with Iran, his home in Tamra took a direct hit from a missile, killing his wife, two of his daughters, and his sister-in-law.
Khatib’s sorrow washes over you like an icy tidal wave as he struggles to hold his tears back. “Iran, they are Muslims, no? I am a Muslim. Is there a difference? The missile came from Iran. Did it differentiate between Jews and Muslims?” As Eleanor Roosevelt once famously noted: “No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.”
Will our illustrious and highly remunerated political leaders across the globe ever take that irrefutable state of affairs on board?
War may be a constant here and, as such, Local Testimony collections are always likely to feature frames of death, destruction, and all manner of hellish fare. But there are other strains and facets that come across from the intrepid photographers on the ground.
“You have the war with Iran, and all of a sudden you have completely different pictures,” says Wohlfeiler-Lalkin. “That was a war that came across, photographically, very differently, with heavy damage on the home front. It generated different images.”
That may be just a touch of improv on the annihilation theme, but the chief curator manages to eke out a spot of sunshine among the national dolor. “It is at times like this when we all come together,” she says, reprising a repeatedly trotted out theme that is often exploited by political figures looking to boost morale in desperate times and, no doubt, enhance their public profile in doing so.
“There is a video work that records regular daily life at a stop on the light rail [in Tel Aviv]. You see haredim, secular Jews, National Religious Jews, foreign workers, refugees, babies, children, families, all together. It all looks kind of normal – a type of routine. It is a very sweet work,” she says.
Whether that indicates national and individual steeliness or simply resignation to the enduring status quo is open to debate. But I was happy to go along with Wohlfeiler-Lalkin’s optimistic take on that.
Local testimony, which in post-Oct. 7 times exclusively incorporates images from here (previously it always came with a globetrotting addendum from the worldwide press), opens with a powerfully emotive and heartwarming video work.
We see families and friends awaiting the arrival, at long last, of the remaining living hostages from Gaza on October 13, 2025. That sets some sort of positive tone for a tour of the exhibition as you take off on a roller-coaster ride that plummets the depths of unimaginable grief, skips into the alluringly seemingly farcical, possibly escapist, crosses into the ostensibly irrelevant, and back into the definitively human and humane, gilded with pure beauty.
During the course of its 22-year existence, Local Testimony has seen war and more mundane existential passages come and go, and it has embraced new generations of photographers, no doubt partly inspired by previously exhibited works. There is a section of the exhibition with images created by high school students that augurs well for continued photographic and sensitive excellence in years to come.
That said, it would be nice to have less regional violence to record and display in the exhibition. It may be definitively photogenic, but I think we would all be happy to dispense with that “pleasure” and have more humdrum topics to view.
Local Testimony closes on January 31. For more information: www.eretzmuseum.org.il/en/exhibitions/local-testimony-2025