Pavlov and Pavlov

Michael Wesely

The sculptor Auguste Rodin said that if he had created his walking statue John the Baptist based on snapshot photography, it ‘would present the bizarre appearance of a man suddenly stricken with paralysis and petrified’. Wesely’s photographs achieve the opposite effect: the individuals seem to efface themselves, to lose their physical substance. His portraits of various individuals are exposed just as long as holding still before the camera can postpone the moment of dissolution. Their vanishing is presaged but not completed, as in the case of the Pavlovian reflex: a dog’s mouth waters when a signal announces food – but the food may not come at all. Likewise, the people photographed have not vanished. They are all still alive and, incidentally, named Pavlov. Ludwig Seyfarth