People at an exhibition

I have always been drawn to exhibitions — of photography first, then of contemporary art in all its forms. The white room, the sequence, the silence that is never quite silent, the moment when an image you had only seen on a screen suddenly has a size, a surface and a distance from your body. I go as often as I can, and I go back.

Somewhere along the way a second obsession grew next to the first: watching the people who are watching. The couple who disagree in front of a painting without saying a word. The man who reads the wall text longer than he looks at the work. The woman who photographs the photograph. The child who finds the only thing in the room nobody else noticed. A group that lines up in front of a mural and, without meaning to, becomes its missing foreground.

At some point I realised I was spending more time looking at the visitors than at the art, and that this was not a distraction from the exhibition but another way of attending it. A work is not finished when it is hung. It is finished every time someone stands in front of it, and every one of those encounters has its own composition: a back, a shoulder, a pair of glasses, a coat against a colour.

"People at an exhibition" is a series of AI-generated colour photographs about those compositions. The works on the walls are invented; the way people stand in front of them is not. Each image is built as if seen from across the room: figures caught between the art and the viewer, reflected, silhouetted, absorbed, bored, or so still that it is hard to say which side of the frame they belong to.

It is a small tribute to the audience — the half of every exhibition that is never in the catalogue.