Txema Salvans, The Waiting Game

“So all of a sudden I came up with the idea of disguising myself, of disguising myself as a topographer. This is once again an idea taken from the world of biology: the idea of camouflage. …in the ecological niche in which these prostitutes work, there are many road workers, because they’re always changing the signage or tarmacking the roads or fixing something. So I saw those workers there. What I did was this experiment: I bought a topographer’s tripod, one of those yellow ones, and I had a mount installed to be able to sit my large format camera on top, and bought the helmet and the vest and that’s it. And I realised, then, simply what I did was to approach the girls to say ‘Look, I’ll be around here for a while near my van’ and that was it.”

“I think that in this work there are various resonances, right? There is, obviously as you say, the photography of The Road, there is landscape photography - there’s the American tradition of that type of photography - there’s another vision of the world of the world of prostitution, there’s also that relationship with those people who have made photographs from StreetView, which has a direct correlation with this image that I’m presenting, so that when you see one of my photos at 1.5 metres and you see the quality of resolution it has, alongside the other type of photograph it’s very different right? Even though the aesthetic format is very similar. It also has resonance with that type of German photography that’s hyper-objective - I’m not showing the prostitute in a situation of doing something so much as the landscape and the character. I think that the work unifies many different histories - it could be catalogued in many different folders, and I like that too. It strikes me as interesting.”

The above is from an interview with The Great Leap Sideways, read it here.