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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathDocument and Abstraction
 
 
 
 
 

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more and more professional manner of the protagonists. On the other hand, if someone in the midst of a nasty argument in front of millions of television viewers no longer understands the instrumentalization of his or her misery, then the private sphere has been wiped out. Viewed in this way, the public sphere has become a giant stage for private fantasies that can be easily blown up by the media into something scandalous, although—or precisely because—they depict everyday dreariness. For celebrities who get caught in the gears of gossip journalism it is also a case of the difficult interplay between the user and the person being used. The passive form is to be found in paparazzidom, where people are literally hunted down with the camera and ‹shot.‹ «Exposures» attempts to address the ambiguity of being exposed, which is ever more determining our relation to media. Artificial sources of light, which come from the area of amateur videography as well as the field of professional studio lighting, therefore our artificial suns, are the subject. In the photoseries the spotlights are standardized at a uniform height, not to present a curious collection of equipment but to direct

 

attention towards the actual central elements of these machines. To me it seems like an interesting opportunity to also be able to direct apparatuses which arose from scientific thought at each other. They allow us to take up perspectives with the ‹third eye› otherwise not available to us. In «Exposures» it is this specific photographic apparatus that enables us to look into a full-powered flash in the first place, for without this auxiliary eye we would not tolerate looking into the light, but go blind instead.

3. «It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false.»

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Technical images cover all of the niches of our present by means of television, the Internet, the newspaper, direct mail advertising and the giant billboard, which in the meantime drapes the entire fronts of buildings or lines streets of houses. We are supplied with the relevant calls at every corner, and are no longer left alone for even a moment. The original intent of propagating information once argued has become an advertising dictatorship, the mother of all battles for the consumer. Media ‹bait,› as has

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