Coincidences

Petrov Ahner

Strangers encounter one another every day; they see each other, sometimes through dirty, foggy, rain-streaked, or reflective panes of glass. Until the doors open and their paths cross, one standing in the way or the other stepping aside, after which they pass by and immediately forget one another. Petrov Ahner records these moments just before the door opens, and he does this not in the formal language of classical photography but in images in which individual features appear hazy, unclear, veiled in shadow. The focus is not on the individual person; everything individual dissolves.
The moment is fleeting, a random concurrence of events that in the same breath disappear again. Petrov Ahner takes fleeting encounters in the big city as his subject: the distorted, unconscious perception of unknown individuals in reflections, superimpositions, and blurs.