Les Rencontres d'Arles Rencontres d'Arles: expositions, stages photo / exhibitions, photo workshops.

Winner of the Photo Folio Review and Gallery award organised in tandem with the Fnac chain at the 2009 Rencontres, Lea Golda Holterman is showing her series Orthodox Eros. In posed pictures of the private lives of young Orthodox Jewish men, Holterman pulls off the incredible feat of breaching a major community taboo. Never before has anyone been able to home in on this subject with such an acute sense of the

constant tension between the Eros of each subject and the way it is expressed. Transcending an initial impression of austerity, the artist has fashioned a new artistic language in this rendering of a privacy at once strikingly sensual and intimately disturbing.

In an openly declared attempt to create ‘the myth of the new Jewish man’, Holterman deliberately challenges the viewer with the sheer power of such an unexpected subject and the undisguisedly posed construction of her photographs. The resultant revelation of the unsuspected triggers fresh consideration of the identity of an entire community.

Exhibition produced with the support of the Fnac.

Lea Golda Holterman

Born in 1976 in Israel.

A graduate in photography from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Lea Golda Holterman created her first project, Exile, about prostitutes working on the outskirts of Jerusalem; the show was exhibited in London at the Assembly Room Gallery in 2008, and at the Cecilia Coker Bell Gallery in Hartsville, South Carolina, the following year. She won the Photo Folio Review 2009 at Arles for Orthodox Eros, her project on the intimacy of young Orthodox Jews, which was shown at the Dada Post Gallery, Berlin, in 2009. She has had her photographs published in magazines such as Eyemazing and Drome Magazine. She has also taken part in several group exhibitions including Tel-Aviv 100 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and History of Violence at the Haifa Museum of Art. Lea Golda Holterman draws her inspiration from peripheral themes and successfully introduces herself into the private domain of groups which, while seemingly separate from our society, are nonetheless deeply connected to major contemporary issues, such as the condition of women and the fundamentalism of certain religious groups.

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