11 silkscreen prints, 101 x 71cm, 2007 / photographed in 2004
‚(…) No other genre of photography represents the idea of progress so well as street photography, combining the desired snapshot moment with the pulsating life of the street. Compared to other modes of visual engagement, street photos take singular responsibility for the vitality of the medium of photography itself, which at this juncture can certainly no longer be classed as a “new” means of expression. Binschtok is undeterred by this hype. She sees the street as a yardstick of the social, mental, and economic state of a society. She plays with the moment of dramatic tension inherent in street photography, the contingency, ( 1 ) but in a way that is as analytical and cool as it is visually compelling. For the images in the series Three People on the Phone, which were taken in Tokyo in 2004 and only found their definitive form in 2007, she chose precisely a moment when three people on the street were using their mobile phones at the same time, to telephone or write an SMS, back in the days before smartphones became the norm.
The small devices in the hands of the passers-by look like children’s toys—they anticipate a new form of urban life that today has become ubiquitous. The people immersed in a dialogue with their devices become figures of “absorption”, as Michael Fried termed it, identifying this demeanour as a fundamentally modern aspect of late-eighteenth-century painting. At the same time the actors are in a chaotic composition: in their absorbed presence they connect the physical space of the old city with the channels of the new, digital world — an interaction that is constantly reiterated in Binschtok’s work.
However, in her mode of presentation, the artist steers clear of the all-too obvious echoes of the digital, eschewing not only high-end inkjet copies but also Baryta paper prints painstakingly developed in the dark room, as these would be a kitsch quotation of the legacy of street photography. Instead, for this series she chooses pop art’s media-based raster: the screen print. The raster can also be read as a metaphor for how the artist configures her gaze, how her scanning for three people using their phones turns into a filter of modern life, already making the “still-contingent” visible as a future standard.‘
Florian Ebner
from ‚with / against the flow‘ Contemporary Photographic Interventions #1 Viktoria Binschtok, 2016
Viktoria Binschtok 