Within the time it takes to walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard

Photography, Video, Text
2008 - 10

The work contains three pieces: photography, video and text.
All of the three have Hollywood Boulevard as a core; each one of these deals with another aspect of the street.

I began to develop a photographic sequence on Hollywood Boulevard, based on my first reaction to the street.
I was disappointed and astonished.
I started to investigate why – my disappointment spoke about expectations I had about the street that were unfulfilled; my ideas of a glamorous Boulevard were not met.
Yet I was surprised that the Boulevard was actually very alive. 
From what I had read about Los Angeles, I had the idea that there was no public space whatsoever.
I hope the photo sequence suggests different ways of readings.
One could be, how the space is set into scene and thus the attraction gets directed; especially with the photographs exposed specifically on the lights instead of the overall-situation.
Another way of looking at it could raise questions of what it is that people actually draws to the street. The way some people are set into light hopefully gives hints towards this, including the possibility of the reverse reading.
Instead of looking for the "shine of the stars" reflecting on them, they actually become their own star for a second.

The videos illuminate a different aspect of the street, the labor that is part of the Boulevard. In this project, I examined the work that is provided with a focus on the work that is performed with a human-to-human interface with the public, which is in a lot of cases also part of the lower-wages-work.
I videotaped the people working on the register at the "Guinness" – building, a flower seller, a woman working in a clothing shop and two of the costume characters, Batman and Superman. The videos are always as long as I could persuade the people to record them and range between two minutes and an hour.
The work is shown as an installation, looped on five different monitors.

The text, The statistics, are mostly gathered by me, and one is invented.
They link the videos and the photos and explore the space between narrative and reality on Hollywood Boulevard.

About the relationship between statistics, photography and video:
All take specific pieces out of a context and re-arrange them new, they have an agenda, they can never tell the whole story, yet still can function as an interesting point of view onto something and create strange, new connections.

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