In Broad Day
"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world." Jean Baudrillard
On the streets of Los Angeles: police raids and arrests, accidents and injuries, glamour and homelessness. It’s all part of everyday life in the big city. Mirko Martin prowls the urban landscape like a hunter, documenting the events of daily existence. But his photographs raise numerous questions. Why is a burning man walking down the street? Where have the victims of a car crash gone? Why are people lying in groups in the middle of the sidewalk? And why are the passers-by ignoring all the catastrophes?
Mirko Martin’s photographs reveal absurd, spectacular, and inexplicable situations that are removed completely from the realm of familiar, everyday experience, leading us to wonder: Are these scenes real or staged? Martin plays with the viewer’s voyeurism and expectations. In his photographs, documentary photography collides with staged photography, and reality seems just as theatrical as the dramatically illuminated film sets of Hollywood. Indeed everything in the image becomes part of the stage. In this tension-filled ambiguity, reality is played off against fiction, challenging the viewer’s imagination.