In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, men are imprisoned, watching nothing but shadows of reality, projected on the wall. For them, that’s reality, since it is all they are familiar with.

Let’s now think on the case of taking pictures. As an ordinary habit, people are used to making this action in several situations, including the registration of new places. If you go to traditional touristic spots, it is often to see that some people seem to be there ‘to’ take pictures, as they look to the place, near exclusively, through their camera visors or screens. Do they want to see them later, instead of enjoying directly the purpose of their presence in that location? Do they want to show the pictures to friends and family? Or is it just the need of men to grasp anything as their own, in a materialistic impulse of possession – even being the object in question a representation, which frequently stays in a digital, immaterial nature?

Anyways, pictures we take constitute part of, besides transforming, our memories. When people go to places to take pictures, this very action – taking pictures – is what they should remind they did there, and not the pictures they took; these actually remind them of what they, for a matter of seconds, gazed at.

Taking Pictures, the Project, is an action towards giving people the possibility of having a physical memory of what they were actually doing while taking photographs.

The plan was: to find people photographing in the streets, to stop them, to take a picture of them during this action, to develop it in the Photo Lab – for its analog nature – and to send to them this photograph by mail.

During two afternoons in the beginning of December, a total of eight people participated. I stopped them in the streets, close to touristic spots in the city of Cologne, Germany, and asked them if I could take a photograph at the moment they were photographing.The reasons each one had to take pictures, at that very moment, were quite unique. The stories people told me became also part of the project. I wrote them in a form of a reminder, or a letter, to send to those people with their photographs.