Meaningless moments

I ended up in Paris. I wandered through the city like a flâneur of earlier times, absorbing the atmosphere of the metropolis with its cafés, baguette vendors, and homeless refugees. Then, on a corner of Rue du Poissonnière, I found a place to photograph: the disused mirrored door of a bank. I began photographing passers-by through the reflective surface of the mirror. I left the graffiti on the mirror and the protruding peephole visible in the foreground—to me, they became a metaphor for the tensions of our time and the sense of being under surveillance.

The Métro swallowed up and released ordinary Parisians, who streamed past me in an endless procession. I photographed all kinds of people democratically, without selecting them in any way. I remained in the same spot and imagined myself using the mirror to frame the street as a stage. I brought together the everyday rhythm of footsteps and the rebellious graffiti on the mirror. I was an observer, yet I too was being observed, as there was an ATM with surveillance cameras beside me.

Back home, I continued my role as a film director quite literally, assembling my photographs into collages, which I then fragmented and reconstructed on the computer. I wanted the images to convey, on the one hand, a lively play of legs, lights, and shadows, and on the other, a sense of monotonous repetition—the flow of people and the density of the crowd, but also feelings of fear and alienation. My own history becomes visible in the images as a fictional and subconscious collage of different urban experiences. The kaleidoscopic diversity of my experience of Paris could never have been contained within a single “decisive moment” in the manner of Cartier-Bresson. Instead, I found it in thousands of seemingly meaningless moments, which, through seriality and repetition, are distilled into new meanings.