The Apparatus
Andrzej Steinbach

The Apparatus shows a photographer taking photographs. We do not see what she is recording but we follow all the individual steps in the process: how she looks at her subject, how the camera behaves in relation to the body, how the body—the locomotor apparatus—turns towards the object. The whole session is recorded in a laboratory situation: the figure wears different styles of clothing—casual look and bullet-proof vest with helmet—and moves on an office carpet between cuboid objects. Different places and scenarios with different meanings are simulated. Steinbach’s previous series Figur I, Figur II and Gesellschaft beginnt mit drei were more about appearance, the question of the legibility of signs, gestures, and the relationships between the figures: here, in The Apparatus, the focus is on a storyline with a figure. It is the third and, for the time being, last part in Andrzej Steinbach’s portrait series.