Around 130 photographs by 52 photographers, chosen from 6,700 photographs submitted to the contest, will be exhibited in the Local Testimony 2023 exhibition. Reflecting the current situation, photographs taken in the early days of the October 7 war will be displayed in the central space of the exhibition. This year the exhibition is marking its 20th anniversary with a unique video installation exhibition comprising selected images from the last two decades.
Local Testimony, now in its 20th year, spotlights the social and historical significance of local photo-journalism and documentary photography, stressing its nature as a cultural and artistic imperative. The photographers’ dedicated and professional work expressed in the exhibition has developed and become more sophisticated over the years and presents a journalistic tradition of investigative media.
The three principal topics featured in Local Testimony 2023 are: the war that broke on October 7, the struggle for democracy. Also on show are central narratives in the fields of religion and faith, sport, urbanism and culture as well as nature and the environment. The events of the war are narrated by nearly 300 images photographed during its first two weeks, tracking the consequences of the attack, the fighting and the civilian enlistment. The images, which will be screened on a central wall in the exhibition space, were chosen specially by Local Testimony board members, because even though the war broke out after the close of the selection period, it was obviously impossible to mount this year’s exhibition without making a significant reference to the war. The exhibition will feature a previous work by the Ynet photographer Roee Idan, who was murdered in Kfar Aza on October 7th.
Local Testimony will appear this year without the World Press Photo exhibition, which we were unable to bring to Israel due to technical issues connected with the war.
20 Years of Testimony
This year, Local Testimony’s 20th anniversary, a special video installation exhibition with a dramatic design, appearance and character will be displayed in a separate space. The exhibition, curated jointly by Local Tesitmony’s director Dana Wohlfeiler-Lalkin and board members Varda Kahana and Ami Steinitz, comprises selected images and video works displayed in the Local Testimony exhibitions during the last two decades. The artist Ran Slavin created the video installation jointly with the curators. The video, accompanied by Slavin’s original music, is displayed on four giant screens. Personal interviews with leading photographers talking about their work and the complex profession of journalism will be shown on separate screens. Photographers interviewed include: Ziv Koren, Rina Castelnuovo, Uriel Sinai, Avishag Shaar-Yashuv and others.
