A disenchanted playroom, 2006

“This work has its origins in an everyday situation: I saw a child watching television. Although it was just a normal scene, the child’s facial expression remained fixed in my memory for a long time. After a while he began to occupy my thoughts so much that I decided to look more carefully to see what it was that had so fascinated me, or perplexed me. Taking virtually the same perspective that I had when looking at the child before, I then set about making the portraits. Only the scenic framework was different, that is, the background and lighting. But this framework was important to draw the viewer’s full attention to the children’s facial expressions. I didn’t want to stylize them, however, but to show them as realistically and naturally as possible: some with dirty or sweaty clothes, just back from playing, with unkempt hair and without makeup. In these portraits it was important to record the precise moment in which the children showed absolutely no impulse or emotion at all, when it was most obvious that they had been taken in by the television in a certain way and had abandoned themselves to it – even when what they were watching was child-oriented programming. Far from demonizing the television and its possibilities, this reveals to me how the world is disenchanted for these children in that moment.”