ARTIST ENTRY~Maurice Benayoun

Maurice Benavoun created World Skin, a Photo Safari in the Land of War. This is a highly interactive art installation. Essentially viewers enter the art space where they can interact with a virtual reality. The viewers move through space comprised of frozen pictures of war scenes, which creates one giant war space. The viewer is instructed to "take pictures" with the "camera" provided. Every time a viewer "takes a picture" the subject of that picture becomes a white silhouette within the virtual reality space.

In this art work, Maurice Benavoun is commenting on photography's power in redefining space, events and people. I think he might be saying that photography essentially strips away the original essence of an event or person and makes that person or event more tangible to the person who took the picture. However, even though photography makes that event/person tangible to the photographer the event itself or the person him/herself become less connected with reality because now they are only associated with the photographs.

I think that Benavoun chose a war scene as the main environment for the art exhibit because there are many startling and memorable, emotional moments that come from war photography. However, i think his intended message becomes lost because of the intensity of war. I believe that the subject of war itself outshines the idea of taking photographs and essentially owning the moment. Although, it could have been his intention to chose a emotional subject matter, such as war, thus in the process of taking photos and stripping those moments away we are stripping away the realness of war and making it tangible and less frightening through photography. Also, the virtual landscape is rather eire because of the combination of the stillness and the seriousness of the photographs.