The location is a photographer's studio. Most Friday afternoons the photographer, Ari Versluis, takes pictures of the people he has invited to pass by to include them in his project. He is dependent on what he observes that week and who is willing to pose for him. His job is to identify and register groups of people, who code themselves, consciously or unconsciously through dress sense and behaviour. His studio becomes the place where those groups meet by chance and individuals offer their image for his camera.

Four young men happened to be photographed that afternoon: Scep, Jan Hein Lakeman, Andries Voskamp and Thomas Moonen. What the photographer's camera wants to capture, is the image the young men display of themselves and the ideas the photographer has of their image. In the moment of the photograph those desires move between them and are expressed exactly on that one spot: the cross on the floor where they are asked to pose for his camera. This cross indicates both that moment of exchange and a momentary intersection of private and public space: in the instant of posing the image that the subject privately projects turns into the image which will be realised in the photograph and become public. The pre-image, the subjective experience of the image, the cliché (the negative), turns into its positive presence by means of a release of the shutter and the flash.

The 16mm film camera was there to record the ritual, which takes place around this particular point. The photographer and the young men were aware of the presence of the film camera as an addition to the photographic camera. The film camera took a position beyond the photograph and extended the moment of posing into a further moment of posing and acting, thereby doubling the weight of the image. In the recording of this act the desires, fantasies and expectations which are producing the representations of "selves", are in transition, moving between all players involved. The camera stays mobile.

The models and the photographer have all become actors, playing the roles they have that afternoon, and partly portraying themselves in the image they expect. The camera is a silent observer of all the transitions, and an active creator of new intermediaries. In a last scene a camera literally changes hands, and is put into the pocket of what happens to be the photographer.




Installation view CAT- Contemporary Art Tower, MAK Vienna, 2002