Local Testimony 2010 (Edut Mekomit) עדות מקומית (לוקל טסטימוני)

this years local testimony juried photo show, which is exhibited along side the world press photo is showing at the Haaretz museum in tel aviv. the show has been around since 2002 and is highly regarded in israel as a stage for photojournalism. almost all active photojournalists have been selected in this show at one point or another.

aside from crazy funny english captions (thanks to the obvious apparent use of google translate or any other israeli english language experts).

actually, alot of them sound just as silly in hebrew, there were also a few weird selections and other ok selections with weird placement choices.

Haaretz reports that out of the 8000 images entered by 400 photographers the shows jury selected 250 images representing 45 photographers. there is a great number thing to analyze here.

for full disclosure, i submitted about 30 images (of which none were selected). there is something strange about  the fact that only about half of the jurors are related to photography in any way (one is a full time veteran photojournalist, and one is a commercial portrait photographer who actually has a photo by her in the show, i dident say conflict of interest).

so lets look at the numbers again.

out of the 45 photographers one, Daniel Bar-ON has won 5 number one entries in different categories including photo of the year.

Yuval Tabol got in with 3 series, totaling 28 photos.

Oriel Sinai got in with 3 series as well, totaling 31 photos.

Tomer Yfrach got in 2 series totaling 19 photos, and also 2 photos in the single categories - total 21 photos.
Nikita Pavlov got in with 2 series totaling 16 photos.

if we put all this together we find that out of the 250 photos that were chosen for the show 101 represent 4 photographers. that means that almost HALF of the show belongs to less then 10% of the participating photographers. this comes from the 8000 photos submitted by 400 photographers.

i guess thats one of the less disturbing things about this show. the real question after viewing all of the photos in the show is how is it different from last years show and what does this years show have to say about the world?

funny that I, who despises these questions when they are directed at me be the one who stumbles upon them.

perhaps it is a perfect fit for what it is, much like this BBC example.