Testimony - Gillian Laub

For the past four years, Gillian Laub has worked in Israel and Palestine, producing portraits of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Nablus, and other locations in the region. Testimony contains fifty of her portraits of Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, displaced Lebanese families, and Palestinianseach personally affected by the geopolitical context in which they live, and each unveiling one more essential element in the puzzle of peace for the Middle East. In some of Laub's photographs, the traces of conflict are immediately observableteenage boys without limbs; a young woman enveloped in scar tissue and a burn-recovery suit. Others are seemingly free from the disfigurements of violence. Yet in the interviews that accompany each portrait, a common thread of survival is revealed. Resilience, pride, defiance, vulnerabilityand most astonishing of all, optimismemerge from one statement to the next. Author David Rieff has said of Laub's work, "To consider [these] images is to be reminded not just of human cruelty and human stupidity but also of human tenacity." Two essays, one by Palestinian-Israeli civil rights lawyer Raef Zreik and one by Israeli professor Ariella Azoulay, underline the complexity of the work and the dialogue Laub hopes it will spark.