"Jakob calling, Siemens L55"

pigmentbased inkjet print on Hahnemühle Baryta

signed, titled, dated and numbered (pencil) on verso

By coincidence, a mobile phone came to rest on the photo paper in the darkroom and rang when a call came in. The photo paper was developed and surprisingly showed the ghostly looking shape of the vibrating and blinking phone. At that time, in the early days of mobile telephony, the devices still had colour LCD displays and illuminated buttons. The different models thus depicted themselves in their photogram in very different ways.
These analogous, almost vivid-looking figures hover above the sheet as if they were unknown beings from undiscovered deep-sea areas or even from foreign planets. The associations are manifold. At the time these images were created, their significance in relation to the rapid development of mobile technology could not yet be assessed. From today's perspective, these photograms form an artefact and a trace of ancient dinosaurs of mobile telephony. If you put a modern mobile phone with touch screen display on a photographic paper, would the paper colour itself in the same way?
This print is a new edition of the original unique specimen.
(Christoph Fuchs)