I WAS THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED
Moran Shoub, Curator

When photographers show us a photo, even when not telling us the full story, they are actually saying through the picture, “I was there when it happened,”; “things happened all the time, but what you see in this picture is what happened before my eyes.”
To be a photographer is, among other things, “being there,” witnessing events and publicly attesting to them: to show, to convey, to report, to disseminate. Being a photographer is a vocation, a civil vocation. Whether photographers are emissaries on their own behalf, or on the behalf of a paper or an agency, or on behalf of the documented public – the photograph does not allow any body to appropriate it, except life itself and the fact that life happened.
What is the importance of “being there when it happened,” and all the more, when everything is documented and photographed and broadcast on the media networks, social networks, and Facebook? “Being there,” is to see with your own eyes – not through the binoculars and filters of others. True, seeing with your own eyes is no simple matter. We can easily find ourselves in the midst of an event and interpret it to ourselves, as we have learned through the interpretations of the press and television which have long been telling us how and what to see. Thus, it is small wonder that you will not find any photograph on Gilad Shalit’s release in this exhibit. The IDF and the state enabled and dictated narrow photographic angles of the event, and photos taken at these specific moments and from these specific angles did not find their place here.
Like the photographers in the field, we the viewers are invited to sharpen our senses: to become aware of the look of our fellow men and women, the look of the person photographed, those standing next to him or her and at ourselves,  the viewers and follow the voices and the body language and choreography of those photographed. And like the photographer aware in the field who shoulders responsibility for what he sees, taking time and place into consideration, the event and the sweat – we, the viewers, are also invited to take responsibility, to look and rethink the lives of others.
People live, people barely live, politicians conspire, photographers photograph, and the judges judged – and out of thousands of photos only 200 were chosen, 200 pictures that retell slices of life, burning lives, and other lives. Life. Period.