Susan Goodman, A matter of Place, Dateline Israel, The Jewish Museum, New-York,
Yale University Press, 2007. p. 36
The individual within an urban setting is the subject of Leora Laor's photography. Like the work of Beat Streuli, who has chosen his subjects randomly from the stream of passerby on the streets of Tel Aviv, the images made by Laor capture the ambience of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim in Jerusalem . The images are blurred and manipulated with digital technology, disarming the viewer with their elusiveness. Yet these photographs are clearly situated in reality, and Laor's depictions reveal the intimacy and diversity that characterize moments in the life of this insular community. The aim is to show familiar scenes, but in an oblique fashion, creating grainy yet luminous pictures of figures who appear evanescent within their traditional setting. With a remarkable sense of restraint the artist has mediated between the inner, spiritual world found in this Orthodox neighborhood and the surrounding secular environment.
John A. Bennette, Collector's Focus, Trends in Collecting Photography,
Focus Fine Art Photography Magazine, Feb 2007, issue #11
..Well, that is what the insiders have to say. What more can I add? I spend a lot of time talking to artists and realize that for them the least concern is trend. The idea of trends feels too much like commercial hype. Appriciation and understanding of their vision by others with the hope of sustaining their creative process is what concerns them most. Everything else is fluid. Is not the need for nerattive depth, color and even new larger scale a type of pictorialism? I feel in love (heat) with the photograph recently, the photograph was by Leora Laor, Untitled #154 that was shown this fall at Andrea Meislin Gallery. It was 32x42". Except for the fact that it was a photograph it was almost timeless, painterly. I felt as if I were eavesdropping on a beautiful, yet awkward moment, the rush of a voyeur. The predominate mood was quit longing and detachment filtered through an amber and absinthe-green palette. There were historical and layered suggestive hints, that allusions and my memory reinforced every time I visited. My soul welled with desire, but in the end, it will be a lost love. I wait to see it published somewhere, so I can rip the page out as a souvenir. So what do I feel about trends? Most of them mean nothing to me. Technology is not a trend; the demand for an artist to create is not one either. The struggle between art and life and fashion and what defines them is constant..
Hilarie M. Sheets, Leora Laor, ARTnews, Feb 2007, pp. 137-138
In this impressive show of photographs, "wanderland #2", Israeli artist Leora Laor pushed her medium far into the the realm of subjectivity and emotion. Surfusing grainy scenes with a saturated palette reminiscent of cintage postcards, Laor isolates heighlightened moments of human longing or frailty.
Part of the drama here derived from the subjects' or in rehearsal. In Happiness ("Osher", Homage to Michael Gurevtich), 2005, a man and a woman face each other with clasped hands, yet the pregnant moment is one of ambighity, because the expressions on the subjects' faces are blurred. the postures imply a prelude to a tryst, a parting, or an act of violence. Another image, of two women ballroom dancing, was shot clandestinely during a dance class and portrays an unself-conscious instant of flirtation that might not heppen outside the confines of the room.
The lonliness conveyed by Laor's portraits of individals nods to Edward Hopper as well as Philip Lorca-diCorcia, who also manipulates lighting and color to highlight the psychologhical space his subjects. In Laor's photo of dancers socializing after a class, one man sits alone at a table littered with half-empty plastic cups, a conteporarycounter-point to Picasso's Absinth Drinker. Half of his face and his eyes are obscured in shadow, while his posture connotes dejection.In another portrait, a forlorn-looking woman caught in profile is brought into strak relief against an intense chartreuse axpanse reflecting the ghosts of black picture frames (Laor took it at a photography fair). Of course, the reflection of the viewer and the black frames in the gallery were also trapped in that same amber, momentarily conflating two worlds of looking and solitude.