be physiologically interesting, but not always ideal, or better: rather seldom, agents of expression. This is what makes photographing people eating a meal so unacceptable. It also leads to the bad reputation of the snapshot, which differs from staged large-format photographs as much as it does from images that celebrate decisive moments. Only recently did party photography first become truly chic and usable in the arts.

So one question might be: With a single photograph can anything at all be expressed about a person, and mimicry as expression be made to function as something interpretable? The single photographic image seems too susceptible to coincidence for assigning to it a semantic beyond the established repertoire of expressions, pathos formulas, or even grimaces. A series is needed. A series of images of the same person from which, afterwards, the most applicable, the most expressive, is selected. Expressive strength would then be a selection principle attributed to a culturally-exercised learning practice, for recognizing truths at all, a capacity of the beholder.

Secondly, the supposed equivalent relationship

between expression and affect/feeling can become confused by the performance. This happens because the actor himself is a malingerer: he performs facial expression and gestures as though these are real, meaning as though these refer to an underlying, inner state of affects/feelings or character. Motion pictures bank on the reality effect with regard to the performance and the filmic image. Yet neither – the performance or the film’s image – is real, but rather genuinely fake to an extent, and therefore a simulacrum.

This is precisely where the works of Isabell Heimerdinger apply: alongside the acted scenes, she places the ‹controlling takes› in which the authenticity or inauthenticity of a character are shown. When do we see the role, and when do we see the actor, as a person? While viewing these scenes, the movie-watching experience mixes with the viewer’s own perspective. As a result, in Heimerdinger’s settings, the actors Kier and Vogler can never really submit to their own performances because they are being filmed at the same and end up posing again. What we see is a fluctuating state, a back and forth between affect (the