CIRCUS

2026, 112 pages, 17 X 22 cm, 50 b/w photographs

In 1996 I attended a circus performance for the first time. Looking back at the snapshots I had taken I realized there was something about them that continued to fascinate me.

After photographing several shows from within the audience I eventually gained access backstage. At first the people in the circus seemed both uneasy and uncertain about my presence and wondered why I was photographing things that, to them, did not appear worth capturing. Before long however they grew so accustomed to me that they stopped paying attention to what I was doing. I was able to move freely through the space and photograph almost unnoticed among them; I had become part of the daily rhythm. For almost a year and a half I photographed performances as well as the life unfolding behind the scenes.

Both then and now my intention was never to document the show itself, although these photographs inevitably remain a record of it. What interested me was capturing the way animals, laborers, and performers – nomads moving within parallel states of captivity, both literal and metaphorical – became part of a vast, surreal mise-en-scène, all participating in a spectacle from another era, destined to vanish; and deciphering the inexplicable feeling I sensed in their gaze at those brief moments when time seemed to stand still and they suddenly drifted inward, suspended beyond space and time.