For four days in late November 2006 I loitered around the photo booth by Rosenthalerplatz in Berlin and asked people who were having their photo taken if they would take an extra strip of photos wearing my glasses. Why did I do this? There were a variety of issues that I was interested in; taking someone’s portrait without having to physically confront them, presenting an individual with an unusual social contract in a public space, seeing to what extent a pair of glasses enhance or reduce a person’s features, exploring the hazy boundary between documentation and fiction…

Nevertheless, I think to a large extent these issues succeeded, rather than preceded, the initial impulse, which was simply to ask people to have their photos taken with my glasses on. Rather than starting with fairly abstract concepts and developing a form with which to investigate them, I started with quite a defined form, whose hidden dimensions I felt I would only understand by actually acting it out. More than anything, this was an experiment.

And as with most experiments the results proved slightly unpredictable, particularly the extent to which the people who agreed to have their photo taken carried out a kind of 20-second performance whilst they were in the photo booth. In some ways, instead of the piece being my performance that challenged participants’ ideas of what you do in public space, it was the participants who performed and me that was challenged by their behaviour..