Egbert Trogemann: Audience

Egbert Trogemann photographs television audiences before the television programme begins. Beginning in 1999, the photographer, born in Düsseldorf in 1954, worked in the studios of television shows in Germany and abroad, turning his camera on the people a broadcast assembles for its own purposes and then keeps out of sight.

By the 2013 publication, the series had grown to more than one hundred photographs. Its premise is the interval before the programme begins. Photographed in the space arranged for the cameras, the audience appears at once as part of the set’s machinery and as a gathering of individuals whose social and cultural differences have not yet been smoothed into the uniform surface of a show. Trogemann registers the disposition of space through which televised reality is manufactured, and equally the social and cultural distinctions a finished programme tends to delete; where those distinctions become visible, the participants take on a sense of authenticity and individuality.

Audience is the first publication of this long-running body of work. The Hatje Cantz hardcover of 2013 runs to 120 pages and reproduces sixty-one photographs, drawn from a series that by then numbered more than one hundred. Texts by Friederike Wappler, Bojana Pejić, Ulrike Haß and Roger Willemsen accompany the plates and address the media aspects of space and of the broadcast audience. Maren von Stockhausen designed the volume, which appeared in German in October 2013; an exhibition at the Kunstsammlungen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum ran from 14 November 2013 to 21 April 2014.

What should hold a collection’s attention is the restraint of the premise: one recurring situation, observed with persistence across more than a decade, each time at the suspended moment before a show begins. Repetition is the method; the camera returns to the same situation, and the weight of the work accumulates across the plates. Set beside the accompanying texts, the sixty-one photographs make a compact, precise record of how broadcast space is organised and who is asked to fill it.

Since 1999 Egbert Trogemann (*1954 in Düsseldorf) has been photographing studio audiences at television shows in Germany and abroad. His large, long-term project, Audience, reveals hidden sides of television’s mass media world: the construction of a reality with an audience that remains invisible during broadcast. The series, consisting of more than one hundred photographs so far, shows the audience before the program begins, and thus conveys a truthful view of events behind the cameras. The disposition of space involved in the construction of reality become transparent. Social and cultural differences that are normally deleted from the perfect surface of the show become evident, but their visibility lends the participants a sense of authenticity and individuality. The essays accompanying the first publication of these photographs also deal with the media aspects of space and audience of a broadcast show.
 
Exhibition schedule: Kunstsammlungen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, November 14, 2013–April 21, 2014
 

Designed by: Maren von Stockhausen
Texts by: Dr. Friederike Wappler, Bojana Pejic, Ulrike Haß, Roger Willemsen
German
October 2013, 120 Pages , 61 Photos
hardcover
247mm x 286mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3682-4

Publisher page editorial text:
| Unique look behind the scenes of various television shows
Since 1999 Egbert Trogemann (*1954 in Düsseldorf) has been photographing studio audiences at television shows in Germany and abroad. His large, long-term project, Audience, reveals hidden sides of television’s mass media world: the construction of a reality with an audience that remains invisible during broadcast. The series, consisting of more than one hundred photographs so far, shows the audience before the program begins, and thus conveys a truthful view of events behind the cameras. The disposition of space involved in the construction of reality become transparent. Social and cultural differences that are normally deleted from the perfect surface of the show become evident, but their visibility lends the participants a sense of authenticity and individuality. The essays accompanying the first publication of these photographs also deal with the media aspects of space and audience of a broadcast show.
 
Exhibition schedule: Kunstsammlungen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, November 14, 2013–April 21, 2014

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