Triggered!: Max Pinckers

From Margins of Excess, 2018 © Max Pinckers

Welcome to our new feature, “Triggered!”. Each week, we will be featuring a single work by a photographer, and asking them to write about what was going through their head, why the photograph was taken, what "triggered" the photograph.

By Max Pinckers

I experienced the United States of America as one big cliché, an exaggeration of its own stereotype. A place of pure superficiality derived from its substance (like coffee without caffeine, alcohol-free beer or butter without fat), like a photograph. I began working with young actors in New York City and Hollywood to produce images that could be used as templates or a kind of “stock photojournalism”; empty containers of the perfect trope, employable in whichever context for whichever tragic event. The people in these images become professional mourners that seem to weep in our stead, as an ancient Greek choir. A classic example that the news media applies after terrible events are closeups of people embracing each other, or portraits of spectators crying, and hugging, which are published over and over again. These images have a maximum emotional impact on the readers that can easily identify with them, much more so than images of the actual transgressive event.