Framing the world

The media are constantly awash with dramatic images, in both textual and visual form. That is the nature of the beast, as news consumers continue to imbibe ever more arresting portrayals of the world about us. We may not be consciously sensitive to the upping of the thrill ante on a day-to-day basis, but anyone who frequents the annual “Local Testimony” exhibition will be keenly aware of the stark aesthetics and emotions fed to us in print and virtual formats throughout the year.

This year’s display of press pictures, produced by domestic professionals and photojournalists from across the world, is currently up and running at its regular venue of the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. Violence and grief seem to draw the eagle eyes of camera slingers of all stripes and, for the fourth year in succession, First Prize on the Israeli side of the competition features a funeral. The domestic winner was taken by Reuters snapper Ronen Zevulun. The frame shows Natan Meir, surrounded by children and other relatives, in a moment of unrestrained mourning. Meir’s wife, Dafna, was murdered by a terrorist who infiltrated the Meirs’ home in the West Bank community of Otniel in January 2016.

“The first pair of words that came to mind after I saw the final selection for the exhibition was ‘devastated country.’ That was my knee-jerk reaction,” notes Micha Kirshner. The 69-year-old award-winning photographer and veteran educator served as curator of the Israeli side of this year’s exhibition.

It is not hard to get where Kirshner is coming from. As usual, there is an abundance of works that feature IDF soldiers and Palestinians front and center and, even if there is no act of violence or suffering actually in the frame, their undercurrent always appears to be sending tremulous eddies across the print in question. There are also plenty of intriguing juxtapositions in the exhibition layout.

One of the inviolable rules of the “Local Testimony” competition is that entries must not be manipulated by computer software. What you click is what you – and we, the public – get. In days of yore the maxim of “the camera never lies” was a given, but technological advances have not only facilitated the capturing, and rapid dispatch, of stunning images; unfortunately they have made it all too easily possible to tweak frames to relay a very different “reality.” Sadly, that has pervaded public consciousness and, sometimes, we tend not to believe what we see.

Thankfully that is never the case with “Local Testimony,” although one should always bear in mind that the presented frame is also the result of the photographer’s decision on where to point the camera. A subtle angle change in one direction or another could radically change the end product.

“One must never forget that photography is always subjective and that each photographer brings his own baggage to his work,” Kirshner explains.

“The great and important advantage of our exhibition, with regard to the local community, and certainly the World Press part, is the ability of the photographers to create capsules of memory. Our memory is very fickle, and we don’t really know what happened at the time.”

Aharon Kritzar’s entry to the Nature and the Environment competition, and which took third place thereof, did not require too much in the way of perspective maneuvering. Then again, it can help to be in the right place at the right time and Kritzar got his temporal gauge spot on when he snapped an enormous rambling cactus melee in the Beteiha Valley at the foothills of the Golan Heights. The caption reads “The prickly pears as metaphor – a field of dying prickly pears at sunset.”

'Just look at this picture, these dying sabras.’(photo credit: AHARON KRITZAR)

That is a rather dry textual substratum to the pictorial majesty that rightly found its way to the cover of the exhibition catalogue.

“It appears to be a very innocent photograph,” Kirshner observes,” and it seems to be completely divorced from any context of intifada or refugee workers or anything like that. Just look at this picture, these dying sabras.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes across concisely and in an almost caricatural manner in Getty Image photographer Ilia Yefimovich’s spectacular shot of a keffiyeh-clad Palestinian hacking away at the security wall. Perhaps, as the artist’s family name suggests, it is no accident that the work appears to reference Soviet imagery tailored to transmit messages of gargantuan might. The young man with the hammer clearly has no chance of breaking down the wall which, by virtue of the frame selection, appears to be infinite, but the relentlessness of efforts come across clearly. The aesthetics are starkly expressive too.

Kirshner gets to see a lot of photographs in the run-up to the exhibition, and of course has a finely tuned eye, but he says that even he did not get the glaring polychromatic subtext.

“A few days ago someone drew my attention to the fact that you can find all the colors of the Palestinian flag in the cactus leaves.”

You can indeed, as the dying sun lights up some of the withering foliage in shades that vary between blood red and amber, while some of the drier items have already taken on a frosted effect and the shaded areas have already been plunged into nocturnal black.

“If I go back to the idea of a devastated country, I don’t think you can find a better exemplar of that than this iconic classic piece of vegetation.”

While action snaps tend to convey the most immediate and compelling impact, there is something to say for the accrued effect of works that have evolved over time. That comes across in no uncertain terms in the Long-Term Projects section of the World Press side of the exhibition.

In particular, Mary F. Calvert’s The Battle Within: Sexual Assault in America’s Military, strikes a raw nerve, especially in view of the reports of sexual misconduct in our own defense forces that continue to emerge over time. It is impossible to stand in front of the chilling outsized monochrome prints in which Calvert depicts female US Army rape victims and the after-effects of the violence. The most powerful of the five pictures does not feature the victim herself, simply because she was no longer alive when the photograph was taken. The work in question shows Gary Noling standing in his daughter Carrie’s bedroom in Alliance, Ohio, on the anniversary of her suicide. Carrie drank herself to death following severe retaliation after reporting her rape to her superiors. Calvert’s five-parter took first prize in the Long-Term Projects category.

From the series ‘The Battle Within: Sexual Assault in America’s Military' (photo credit: MARY F. CALVERT)

Nancy Borowick’s A Life in Death, the runner-up in the same section, is just as emotive, although it evokes a smile or two betwixt the tears. After more than 30 years of marriage, Borowick’s parents were both diagnosed with cancer. Rather than give into sadness as death beckoned, the couple opted for a more positive and proactive approach as the sands of time trickled out on them. They elected to spend their final months together creating new memories, which were lovingly captured by their daughter’s camera. You cannot help but be moved by the collection of blackand- white prints, which also feature the photographer’s wedding, and which capture moments of unadulterated love alongside images that conjure up more than a little empathy.

There is more in the way of heartrending stuff in Portuguese journalist Mario Cruz’s set of shots of students who attend a draconian boarding school in Senegal. The accompanying text conveys a sense of the horrific conditions in which the children are kept, and Cruz’s four frames transmit her gentle empathy towards the subjects, as well as ensuring the end result is as polished as possible. The four-parter was awarded first place in the Contemporary Issues category.

Context is, of course, all-important and, as any artist will tell you, so is composition. The latter point is made succinctly in Oren Ziv’s entry, which took second prize in the Society and Community classification. As Kirshner noted, covering the top part of the print with his hand, most of the photograph appears to be of a supremely bucolic ambiance.

“This could be a simple documentation of some pastoral-based festival, or such like,” says the curator. “You can see these women are Muslim, but they could be Jewish too, just walking up a hill, maybe to celebrate something.”

The entire picture changes when Kirshner uncovers the uppermost strip of the print to reveal a bunch of looming bulldozers that, it now becomes abundantly clear, are there to demolish some structures that have been erected on a ridge without legal approval. There are more items in the exhibition relating to Beduin communities living on the margins of Israeli society.

Contextual impact also comes through clearly in Ilan Ben Yehuda’s insightful first-prize winner in the Series section of the Religion and Faith category, which is described as an imaginary trip back in time – the Mea She’arim neighborhood over the past three years. The period in question ran from September 2013 to May 2016, and the most dramatic of Ben Yehuda’s prints caught a blackclad young Muslim girl walking past a billboard with a bunch of notices. The girl is enveloped by black silhouettes of men who, like her, sport monochrome garb although, of course, of a very different religious and sociocultural origin. The posters, too, are in black print against a white background, and the strong sunshine backlighting only serves to further heighten the already clear-cut contrasts of the frame. The work borders on kitsch but manages to deftly steer clear of the overly familiar visual minefield.

Thankfully, the Nature and Sports categories appear to be devoid of political intent, and Sergio Tapiro’s shot of the Colima volcano in Mexico as ash and ice particles shoot up into the air and cascade down the molten peak is stunning. The drama is appreciably heightened by the static electricity-fueled lightning bolt that Tapiro fortuitously captured. Christian Ziegler, a 44-year-old former biologist, caught an equally astounding image of a chameleon shooting out an impossibly long tongue as the creature catches a snack.

Increasingly, photographers are driven to push the boundaries of their work and Japanese artist Kazuma Obara certainly went the whole hog with his Exposure entry, which took first place in the People section. Obara took camera film that had been exposed to nuclear radiation in the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the then Soviet Union, and took pictures that may lack a professional, polished end result clarity, but manage to impart a strong sense of the horrific conditions in the affected region, and how this impacted on local residents.

There are also some comic slots at Local Testimony, such as Ahikam Seri’s whimsical shot of a row of haredi young men at Mir Yeshiva studying in a hall with a mountain of furniture perched precariously in the background. Refugees account for a little less of this year’s layout than in previous editions, but even there one finds a comic element in a picture of Syrian women getting ready to pose in a makeshift open-air studio setting.

The exhibition runs until January 21.

Picture perfect: The International and Israeli Photojournalism Exhibition brings 2016 into sharp focus.