Transient

In our everyday life the symbolism of today’s newspaper hardly strikes us as something unusual or extraordinary. We consider the familiar quantity of paper as a normality of most societies across the world; it seemingly has the same material, format and purpose – it functions as a quiet confirmation of consistency despite cultural diversity and national borders. Yet, the short life of a media that is already expired and considered as trash the day after it is produced, creates a double impression of an entity both physical and transitory. The newspaper as such becomes a momentary, fictive reality and each photograph in the sequence captures the mediation between time passing and a moment that does not exist any longer, since photography itself is a transient media.

The pictures indicate an unrestrained fictive authenticity and combine expectations with imagination as the viewer is forced to create his or her own stories from the pictures: The title of the single work – date and name - identify actual events and information and thus involves an active participation by the spectator – someone was in the middle of the described events, someone did produce the written material, and someone actually examined the content of the pages.

These aspects are demonstrated within the photographic reality – a reality that only exists because of the photograph and as a result reflects the connection between the two medias. The pictures thus illustrate newspapers as objects floating in an indefinable dark background – in a room where the sum of signs generates uncanny sensations of something that has disappeared and can no longer be touched. Still, the impression continues to exist as mental and emotional patterns that form vague narratives.
The printing house further combines the artistic conception of photography with the real creation of a newspaper. This specific place develops into a symbolic position of the account of life and death, happiness and distress and wordlessly trough the photographs implies fleeting stories of varied nature - captured in the double notion of both a workplace and a source to anecdotes of human lives. The viewer instantly notices traces of passed moments in time inside the pictures – but only to feel the primary impression melting in a startling experience of the vulnerable perception of disappeared time.

Eva Bunimowicz
BA in Comparative Literature
Freelance writer, Copenhagen