Ribeira in the background

Martin Josek

The desire to boast is as old as mankind, but in today’s consumer society it �ourishes likenever before. Photos from holidays change from those that people took to descibe wherethey were and what they saw to photographs in which the individual is the central topic and the rest is simply the background. Me and the pyramids, me in Hollywood, me infront of the Buckingham Palace, the Eifel tower or the Statue of Liberty. The important thing is that I was there and I can show you. Digital photography and internet pro�les are the perfect tools to do so. How this fenomenon e�ects the public space is what I tried to capture in my work. As a non-participating viewer I sat in Ribeira a waited for tourists from all over the world to take the same photos over and over again...