On a periphery next to a newspaper stand in an old street-display case a strange image appears. The display case itself is strange enough. During the past years it has been used by many, by gardeners' association as well as rebels. Next to the newspaper stand, where hundreds of shiny colorful magazines are sold everyday, Sasa Vajd and Hynek Alt hung a photograph and decent metal plate. The display case alone is a rebus, challenging task to engage on a place where attention flows in the rhythm of trams and shop windows, a task of attracting attention from a former tendentious spot. How does one do that?
The roll of film looks a little like a poor kids' toy. The Japanese sell it and they made it somewhere even else. And beside it is a medium, database, the most impetuous intelligence enchanted in physics and chemistry. As if the roll of film now discovers curiously what it can, given certain conditions, become, what it's able to swallow, what can be pushed down it's throat. At the same moment it doesn't have the slightest idea it is itself a model. Funny!
An image of a film in the display case isn't actually a photograph. Rather it is one of a few options to deny photography as evidence, how to aim at showing (obviously futilely) the true phenomenon of photography. (After working on commercials this desire seems very understandable.) And the main has happened already. We are in the "exposed" stage, the roll is exposed, finished, ready for processing. Mysteriously pregnant, alone in one shot. And yet it is also "exposed", meaning displayed for a show. Shot in search for a strange pleasure, which is as hardly understandable as TV stars on magazine covers just a few steps away, as the factory wall, as Holesovice, as the world. Shot and exposed.
Pavel Vančát
Karlín, 25. srpna 2005
Exposed is a part of the ongoing Documentation Project.