National Portrait Gallery

  • slide projection
  • 75 medium format colour transparencies projected endless, each stays for 16 second
  • Like my earlier projections Weißenfels (1996), Leipzig Hbf. (2000), Cambridge Circus (2000) and Oxford Street (2004), National Portrait Gallery consists of a series of photographs. Once again, it centers on an urban scenery, this time the prestigious front of a museum in London. Shot with almost identical framing, the photos focus – quite literally each one in itself as well as the series as a whole – on a street performer, who is presenting herself as a ›living picture‹ both inside the photographic frame and by transforming the street into a stage. This dual performance of a sculpture’s stillness refers to the act of visual fixation and by that to the constitutive paradox of photographic representation itself: the presence of a instance that won’t be passing by.

› Slideshow

© 2008 Frank Berger