In the gallery, the noise of 2025 goes quiet. No push alerts, no shaky clips looping on repeat. Just a single frame – a face, a street, a field, a crowd – asking you to do what the past year rarely allowed: slow down and see.
That’s the premise of Local Testimony 2025, Israel’s flagship photojournalism and documentary photography competition, with the winners exhibited at MUZA, the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv, at the end of last year. It’s not a highlight reel. It’s an early draft of the historical record.
Ilia Yefimovich, a Russian-born Israeli documentary photographer and photojournalist and curator of Local Testimony 2025, describes the competition, and its accompanying exhibition, as a selection mechanism – a yearly decision about what will remain visible when memory becomes contested.
In Israel, history doesn’t wait politely to be archived. It arrives mid-crisis, mid-argument, and mid-grief – and then gets rewritten in real time.
Photojournalist for Israeli daily Haaretz Itai Ron – whose abstract shot of the silhouettes of ultra-Orthodox men and IDF soldiers won the competitions Photo of the Year for capturing one of the most urgent and divisive stories of 2025 in a single frame – is blunt about what a photograph can claim.
“It’s not always accurate,” he told The Jerusalem Report, “because there are things that are outside the frame.”
And still, he argues, it matters precisely because it leaves evidence behind. Photography “prevents what is called fake news, or rumors in the future,” he said. “You have it. It’s there. I saw it.”
What survives
To walk through the exhibition of Local Testimony is to see a year edited into a narrative. But behind the walls, it begins as a sorting process that decides what makes it into the public record and what disappears into hard drives.
The scale is enormous. Roughly 7,000 works were submitted by 366 photographers. From that flood, 82 selected works – videos, stills, single images, and series – were chosen, created by 64 participants. The numbers matter because they reveal the project’s power: Local Testimony is not a feed. It is a filter.
Yefimovich described the selection as a professional narrowing of the lens. “There are seven people who are sitting and looking at those pictures in a couple of rounds,” he said, “and they are choosing what they think is important.”
Important can mean urgency, craft, or a detail that changes what you think you’re seeing. “Sometimes… the story is more relevant, or it simply looks better,” Yefimovich said. “In my opinion… I’m looking for perfection.”
Perfection, here, is not polish. It’s the rare frame where chaos arranges itself into clarity – composition, timing, and meaning landing at once. And in a year that produced endless iterations of the same trauma, “sometimes… images are very similar and look alike,” he said. That’s when you “look carefully for small details” to find “the perfect moment.”
Beyond phones
Phones are always up; images move faster than verification. So what makes a professional photojournalist essential now?
“The importance of the photographer is understanding the story behind all of that,” Yefimovich told the Report – knowing where to stand, what to include, and how to tell a story, “and not just seeing things that are happening in front of you.”
“Everybody today is a photographer,” he said, “but a photographer’s role is to make it a bit more complicated, a bit more interesting.”
In other words: not more dramatic – more legible. The frame that lasts is the one that reveals something you didn’t know you were missing.
Ron’s own work circles the same question from a different angle. For him, the photograph is not the whole story but the start of the record: a piece of evidence that future arguments will have to confront.
Cost of witness
Yefimovich described the act of photographing chaos as a mental shift.
“When you’re picking up the camera, something happens, and you’re becoming an outside person,” he said. “It’s… like a safe space; it’s like a curtain.
“Like a curtain in a theater… you put it up, and then some magic happens,” he said.
Behind the camera, “you don’t think about… those things that can maybe harm you at that instant,” and you keep shooting, even as others run away.
History in focus
Local Testimony doesn’t ask viewers to agree on what 2025 meant. It asks them to look at what happened – and to remember that it was lived by specific people, in specific places, at specific times.
Some frames carry history in their caption as much as in the image. One photograph shows Gadi Mozes, an 81-year-old farmer from Kibbutz Nir Oz who was taken hostage on October 7, back in the fields after his release from captivity – not the dramatic moment of return, but what comes after it. The line attached to him is plain: “I will do my best to rebuild Nir Oz.”
In years to come, when 2025 is reduced to dates, decisions, and headlines, this is the kind of evidence that will still explain the period: a man trying to restore a home that cannot fully be restored, and a country living in the gap between resilience and irreparable loss.
Ron focuses less on captions and more on what sits outside the frame. In Kifl Haris, a Palestinian village that periodically fills with religious pilgrims, his winning image captured only silhouettes and shadows thrown against a wall. Stripped of its backstory, he said, the frame reads like emptiness and “you won’t know that people live there.”
The scene can feel like there’s nothing there, as if it’s an abandoned city. He described closed tombs and cemeteries, a “festival” atmosphere spilling into residential spaces, graffiti, and a surreal switch where the village seems to “live for a moment,” then look “completely dead.”
Once an image implies absence, absence becomes the narrative.
The picture is evidence, but it is also a prompt – a demand to read beyond the obvious, to ask who is missing, what came before, and what sits just outside the border of the frame. “If we don’t go deeper and don’t read the context of our life, of our history, we won’t know what the story really is,” Ron said. The photograph records what was visible – and reminds us how much wasn’t.
Proof for tomorrow
This year’s exhibition also includes a joint video project titled Gaza, described as a collaboration between Israeli and Gazan photographers documenting life during the war, and the return of Young Testimony, showcasing the work of 22 emerging photographers after a two-year hiatus.
It also includes a Photo of the Year prize awarded by the Union of Journalists in Israel in memory of Roee Idan, a photojournalist killed on October 7; and a prize for a selected video journalist awarded by the Shomrim Center for Media and Democracy.
Together, these choices underline Local Testimony’s aim to be an archive, not just a mood board of a tough year. While the physical exhibition closes at the end of January 2026, the photos will be collated into a book and live on through the organization.
Photography doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t fix what happened, heal the damage, or bring back what was lost. What it can do is limited – and, in a year like this, necessary: to preserve moments before they’re rewritten.
Years from now, the images chosen for Local Testimony will shape how the future remembers the present. Not because they tell the whole story but because they make it harder to pretend the story wasn’t here.■