Spur of the Moment - Over a period of nine days, Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel and I took 10,000 photographs of the city of Stockholm during its popular Water Festival. These images were exhibited as they were produced at three different sites simultaneously: at the Moderna Museet, in a stand set up in the middle of the Water Festival and on the Internet site of the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, using it as a dairy of our experiences.

For this exhausting commission we conceptualized our work as a personal form of mass media. We tried to detect emerging themes, represent them in photographic terms, and organize and distribute these images as quickly and as well as we could. By transposing a photojournalistic model within our respective practices, we sought to reduce the important temporal gap between the moment of production and that of distribution, which often characterizes a traditional exhibition. This urgency to show our discoveries, before digital photography, was facilitated by a one-hour photo lab.

As “photo-journalists”, improvisation became the rule, implying a necessity for spur of the moment analysis of the unfolding events. In order to uncover some sort of meaning within this increasing mass of images, different presentation and archival systems were tested and improved upon during the nine days of our intervention. In contrast to a daily newspaper with its static thematic sections and descriptive headings for organizing information, we wanted to establish a give and take, photos indicating possible categories and in turn, original classification schemes pointing the way towards new subjects. As the exhibited material was replaced by new information it was catalogued in binders for future reference. At the end of our action, the organizational systems settled in, adapting to this information flow, fitting the particularities of this popular event.