I realize that the title of this post can suggest it is going to be about something really, really depressing. But let me comfort you, this isn’t the case. It just happens to be the title of an awesome-ish art project that got to me a few days ago.
In the summer of 2007 the Copenhagen located photographer Simon Høgsberg took his camera and traveled down to Berlin. He walked onto the railroad bridge in the Warschauer Straße (probably this one), took out his camera and started to photograph people that passed by. He sat there for twenty days (I hope he got a bit of night rest between the days) and just took photographs, from the same spot, of different people. After twenty days he had about 178 faces on his memory card and went home, where he sewed the whole together.
The result is a piece of art that measures 100 meter x 78 centimeter (yes, that is a onehundred meter long photograph). I’m not sure if it is exhibited somewhere (I wonder what sort of venue has got space for such a piece of art) but it is available through his website.
When looking at the piece of art you see people. Lots of people. People that hand out flyers, people that go to work, people that are young, people that are old. And yes, also people that have got a patch on one of their eyes. Somehow Høgsberg managed to merge a lot of different groups into one piece of art. There are punks, skaters, elderly and colored people. There’s also a variety of emotions present, angry people, sad people and (luckily) also happy people!
Høgsberg says:
Only few of the poeple on the photograph seemed to know I was taking their picture.
Which is wonderful somehow, no? To capture people without knowing they are being ‘captured’. I think that the photographer gets the most natural impression in this way. As Høgsberg said, there were a few that did knew. There are a few people that gaze straight in the camera, find them for yourself, some of them really made me smile.
The full title of the project reads: We’re All Gonna Die – 100 meters of existence and I reckon it can be rather depressing. But if you think about it, it isn’t. Høgsberg captured ‘existence’, he captured 178 lives and brought them together into one piece of art. Everyone you see in the photograph (and around you) is going to die. But the diversity of our lives is so extremely, outrageously beautiful, that the fact that we are mortal is just something minor.
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