Paparazzi –⁠ G.R.A.M.

With its series of images spanning more than a decade the Austrian artists’ group G.R.A.M. provides its own take on the “end of privacy” so invoked by the media. By blending these images with their own photographs of real stars and celebrities the group has seriously disrupted the conventional mechanisms used to construct reality. The images shot in locations such as Hollywood, New York, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, London, Vienna, Berlin and Graz simulate realities which exist only in the onlooker’s mind. The mass media’s internalised codes make it easier to veer off onto the wrong track and venture into grey areas between appearance and reality.

In these images of essentially bland, everyday scenes from the immediate neighbourhood, the play with (alleged) sensations, with voyeurism, deception and the laws of the media undergoes a dramatic reinterpretation: the ordinary is charged with magic and mystery through the aesthetics of the paparazzi. And act becomes fiction.

G.R.A.M. (Günther Holler-Schuster, *1963, Martin Behr,* 1964), live and work in Graz (Austria)