"Movies-series includes thirty pictures rather similar in form in which cinema halls and audiences are viewed during film screenings. The exposure time is always the full length of the film shown. The light – excluding any direct light from the film projector – originates in the film being shown and is reflected back on the audience from the movie screen behind the camera. Frame by frame, the film exposes the photograph and so forms a picture of the people watching it.

I tried to find a correlation between the film screened and the photograph it exposes and, at the same time, a new perspective of time and the ways we handle it – both being characteristic of the cinema, which has played a major role in forming our contemporary understanding of time. Photographs are also self-portraits that (like a diary) describe and remind me of what I have seen, registered with my own eyes, and experienced. They are attempts to sense what is beyond the senses – to see in the dark. I filmed Movies-series about two and a half years ago in 2000-2001, while studying at the Academy of the Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague."

(Movies by Ville Lenkkeri, 2003)

Movies
55x75cm,
digital c-print / Diasec.