#1, #2, #3,
2020, Digital Photography, Ink-Jet on Hahnemuehle, Framed, 49 x 54 cm
These three photos show how images of the Covid-19 virus are presented to the public in everyday news and media. By using different colored backgrounds as well as enlarged views of the coronavirus, the images of the virus become vivid and recognizable, but in constantly changing representations.
The illustration in the photos shows either a moderator, an expert or a politician who has a black or mirrored box on his head. It illustrates the limited information that even a public moderator has on the topic of the new disease, which is literally reminiscent of the feeling of “knocking in the dark”.
The imaging of the virus, which can only be perceived under a microscope, is handled in very different ways in the agencies and the media. The virus appears medially in a wide variety of forms, as digital illustration or greatly enlarged microphotography, edited in any color, mostly in cool or warm tones. This approach reinvents the image of the virus every day anew and fresh, one can say in quite “mutated” forms, placed on the cover or as a figure-sized back projection on the screen of the TV studio, thus becoming a form of pop star. “Experts” (gatekeepers) sit in the studio, who are quite indifferent to the truth because they don’t know or want to know better, and are thus used as a means to the end of their constantly changing points of view.
