Vince Alletti, Going on about town, The New Yorker, November 2006

For her second New York show, this Israeli photographer refines a technique she used in her first, surreptitiously recording people in public and allowing her distance from the action to create a soft, grainy haze over the resulting image. Because several of her subjects are actors onstage or dancers in rehearsal, Laor's artifice is far more apparent this time around. But reducing her cast of characters, often to a solitary figure, helps focus and intensify the drama, and keeps it from dissipating at this larger scale. In a world resigned to isolation, Laor seizes upon the few moments when two people touch, but she doesn't pretend that they're a sign of hope.

Eric Herschthal, Shooting without Violence, The Jewish Press, October 2006

To Americans, it seems Israelis know only violence, or the threat thereof. Our newspapers and magazines bombard us with images and articles about failed peace talks, checkpoints, bombings, Katyusha rockets, hatred, misunderstanding, recalcitrance.

But two evocative exhibits in Manhattan by Israeli photographers make the case that there is life beyond the theater of war. At the 92nd Street Y, Dinu Mendrea's black-and-white photographs do not ignore the violence, but instead take the second intifada as its expressed backdrop, showing Jews, Christians and Muslims either before or soon after violence has erupted.

Leora Laor's photographs, displayed at the Andrea Meislin Gallery, stay mum about the killing in Israel, instead featuring anonymous men and women dancing, acting, drinking or thinking. Yet Laor's art, like Mendrea's, is not escapist. Alienation, sentimentalism and a brooding sense of loss characterize her photographs, making one wonder if anyone but an Israeli could know such pain.

Mendrea, a 36-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, titles his show “Trying to be 20 in Jerusalem.” Yet the age range seems either irrelevant or beside the point throughout most of the 26-photo show. One of the most perplexing images, titled “Purim,” depicts four chasidic men chatting, their backs to the camera, while a fifth man is sprawled on the floor behind them, face up, in a drunken stupor. They are in the fervently Orthodox community Mea Shearim, celebrating a holiday during which getting drunk is an accepted custom.

“A very similar image could have been taken in a very different context,” says the blurb next to the photograph. A few days later, we are told, a suicide bomber detonated himself near where these men were standing and lying. The thought is horrifying, but provocative. Here we have a group of men, of indeterminate age, celebrating one of Judaism's most joyous holidays. But in a moment, they will be grieving one of contemporary Judaism's most grim realities.

There is an obvious narrative gap between the two — mirth and misery — and Mendrea refuses to document the connective context. There are no photographs of suicide bombers, no Israeli tanks, no blood, guts or glass shown strewn across the streets. And thankfully so. Instead, next to photographs like “Purim” we get images like “Waiting Room,” in which one listless soldier and his rueful comrade sit across a barren hospital waiting room, while the space between the two is filled by an Arab woman grieving, with her child crying in her lap. The four are surrounded by white walls interrupted only by electric sockets and a sterile white floor, a stark contrast to the mother and her son's wails.

Mendrea's eye for capturing the thin line between joyousness and loathing is finely tuned, as is his ability to reproduce it on grainy black-and-white film. In an untitled photograph, Mendrea shoots a young women (this one actually does look like she is in her 20s) dancing at Haoman 17 Club, one of Jerusalem's most popular, as her hair swings one way and her faced is twisted another. Her eyes are closed shut; her breasts barely concealed by a dark, skin-tight tank top. She looks as if she is shaking off demons, much more so than gyrating to a beat. She dances alone.

Alienation is as present a theme in Mendrea's photographs as it is in Laor's. But Laor's show, entitled “Wanderland #2,” is also a stylistic counterpart to Mendrea's. Her photos are shot mostly in color and on a digital camera. They are highly doctored and much larger than Mendrea's, giving a painterly quality to a dozen or so works on display that are stunning.

Take the opening photograph placed on the wall adjacent to the entrance. It is a four-foot-high, six-foot-long image of a balding, portly man gripping the hand of a morose, young woman who is looking away. The couple stands off-center, to the right of the frame, against a beige stucco wall and deep purple curtain bathed in a sultry afternoon light. Like most of Laor's photographs, the image is severely out of focus, establishing a conceptual distance between the subjects and the viewer. The man and woman seem to be speaking past one another — alienated from a love that, perhaps, once was.

Like this picture, taken from a play called “Happiness,” many of Laor's photographs are of theater or film performances. In another picture from the same play, we see the profile of a solitary man, out of focus again, his face looking out into the dark distance, away from the viewer. A hazy curtain, blue at the top, white at the bottom, contrasts with his black blazer and chocolate brown pants. His exact thoughts we cannot know. But we can only imagine that they are somber, lonely and deep.

Though Laor has made a name for herself with her beautiful, despondent images — her work is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in other major museums around the world — these are perhaps her most heavy-hearted. After more than two decades of marriage to the renowned Israeli painter Michael Sgan-Cohen, during which she only sparingly took photographs, Laor is now widowed. Since his death in 1999, Laor has begun photographing again, and the resultant images speak from the heart of a bereaved wife, and a smarting Israeli.

Perhaps no image captures her despair more than the one that hangs behind the curator's counter at the Meislin Gallery. It depicts the backs of a man and woman, each with one arm draped over the back of the other, as they look over the greyest of blue seas. The woman's orange-red hair is tied in a bun; the man's black hair is covered by a fedora. The flatness of the subjects likens Laor's work to the Realist painter Gustave Courbet, their emptiness to that of Edward Hopper. The image is taken from an old video. And how fitting, moreover, to learn that that film, and Laor's photograph of it, is titled “Victims of Duty.” n.

The Buzz, Leora Laor, The Jewish Week, Oct. 13, 2006

Chelsea 's splendid Andrea Meislin Gallery, which specializes in modern photography, presents a second exhibition by Leora Laor, one of the Israel 's most fascinating photographers. Titled "Wanderland #2", the work focuses mainly on the all-embracing topic of the human condition in modern society. Using extreme colors, enlargement and other techniques, Laor creates works that are at once corporeal and frail, haunting and warm, and exquisitely beautiful. The exhibition features three main groups of work – lone portraits, couples, and still lifes – the former of which brings to mind 19 th and 20 th century portraiture, especially the works of Marry Cassatt and Edward Hopper. And, like Hopper, what governs here is alienation, detachment, loneliness, themes which Labor accentuates further by turning to theater and dance classes to showcase human fragility. Laor was the recipient of the Leon Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli Artist in 2005. Her work is in private and museum collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York , the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Gemeentemuseum den hag, The Netherland – Andrea Meislin Gallery.

David Bonneti, Danny Yahav-Brown and Leora Laor, Post-Dispach, March 2006

Yahav-Brown was born and raised in Israel, but his work isn't identifiably "Israeli." Israeli photographer Leora Laor lives in Jerusalem, and her subjects are Israeli, so that makes her work literally "Israeli," although her intentions - to document a lifestyle, to create timeless imagery out of daily life - are the intentions of artists who live in many places.

Her new work shows a romantic sensibility, filtered through post-modernist distancing effects, that is mature in its vision and realization.

In one body of work, Laor made still images of people in a public park in Jerusalem that she had clandestinely taped on digital video. The small figures, photographed from a great distance, possess the timeless quality of people from biblical stories. The golden light suggests Italian cinema from the postwar period, and the figures seem to be occupying stage sets. One image of four women in long dresses is reminiscent of paintings by French Barbizon painter
Millet.

In her other series of digital photographs, Laor again takes pictures of unsuspecting people. This time her subjects are Orthodox Jewish women, who in their long dresses and scarves look as if they are from another age. In one print, a girl with friends looks back toward the photographer, catching her at her game. The girl looks unsettled, but she offers no menace.

Ivy Cooper / Riverfront Times, St. Louis , Feb. 15, 2006

Leora Laor Israeli artist Leora Laor is working in territory that's being explored by lots of contemporary photographers: the relam of the cinematic, or the quasi-cinematic – i.e., images that look like stills from surveillance video or avant-garde cinema and that sweat ambiguity through their pores. But few do it as well as Labor whose digital prints portray figures is an ambiguous landscape (the "Image of light" series) or orthodox women and girls in Jerusalem (the "Wanderland" series) with the blurry, snapshot effect that secures a sense of mystery and odd authenticity). I was unfamiliar

With Laor's work before seeing this modest exhibition, which suggests she's an artist to keep an eye on. Through March 30 at the Ellen Curlee Gallery.