"Before the screen": zazombirovanny viewers
EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is the “Watching TV” series by French photographer Olivier Cullman, who has studied for several years how TV has equally successfully introduced people from the United States, Morocco and India into trans.
I have been doing photography since 1992. While working on the project "Watching TV", I managed to live in the USA, Morocco and India, in each of these countries I photographed people who were comfortably settled at home and supposedly mesmerized by the TV. The idea of this series was born when I was shooting in New York another project dedicated to the September 11 tragedy. Then I concentrated on how people — no matter Americans or tourists from different parts of the world — look at Ground Zero in confusion and bewilderment, and their faces are bitter and embarrassing, understandable to everyone.
I started working on the project "Watching TV" in 2004. Just came to strangers home and filmed them while watching TV. Most easily agreed to participate in the project. My goal was to catch that very state when a person completely immersed in an image on the screen, his TV seemed to be hypnotizing: the mind becomes clouded, as if lulled by flickering frames, and attention is dissipating. This state of numbness of the mind can last for a few minutes, and maybe for hours. There is nothing more banal and at the same time alarming. Because it is precisely in these moments before the television screen that our perception of the world develops, prejudices are destroyed and new ones are born, but we see not the real world, but only our fantasy about it. We meet with a bunch of people from different countries of the world, not getting up from the couch, and remain fully confident that we really know them. But it is not.
My works are always devoted to people whose fate touches me for being, worries or puzzles. For me, the main thing is that the photograph reflects the author’s subjective and specific view of the world around him.
