THE MOMENT BEFORE \\ Dana Gillerman, Curator
“The images received this year for the contest are hard to look at, ” the jury said.“ There was a war this year,” was an attempt to explain the scenes in almost all the contest’s categories, be it news, where it was self-evident, or scenes from everyday life. But the scenes are not all the product of war. Most of them reflect a routine reality. In many of those images one can sense the tense silence and uncertainty, even if they are seemingly pastoral.
It seems that this exhibition marks not only the “decisive moment” (the phrase coined by Henri Cartier Bresson, defining a critical point in time), but the moment before, the moment before the catastrophe. It seems that this exhibition in its entirety is at that moment, and this is can be seen in the photo of the year by Kobi Gideon. It is a news frame taken during Operation Cast Lead. In the photo there is smoke, but no fire. There are tanks that seem small and harmless.This is a silent war, seemingly devoid of drama, but something is going on there. And when it explodes, the entire area will go up in flames.
Newspapers are a kind of visual material archive: a dead Palestinian boy next to a top model, a murder suspect next to a soccer player. This lack of hierarchy was the basis for the curatorial concept, assuming that there was no point in trying to create a division into subjects within all this chaos. Any division of this kind would be artificial and would fail to portray a reality in which everything is fluid and intermixed. The idea was to follow this disorder and hang the photographs according to an external, almost arbitrary theme, based on similarity of form. Thus, for example, in a group of photographs there are pairs, and therefore they were hung next to one another: nuns dancing, father and son praying, a homeless and his dog. This choice creates a connection between topics that are seemingly unrelated: culture and war, homosexuals and Ultra-Orthodox, violent ecstasy of soccer fans on the pitch and a mass demonstration in Gaza. But this choice, despite its alleged arbitrariness, also creates a picture of the local reality over the past year.