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.