Eva Leitolf: she observes from the sidelines, but without making us feel the restlessness that drove Waugh both to seek people out and to flee from them.
One of her most powerful pictures is from the 2004 series "Rostock Ritz". It shows two hunters in the Namibian bush and a young girl watching them take aim. We see the girl only from behind; the tense calm is almost unbearable. Quite apart from the age-old artist's trick of stealing into one's own work, we see something else here: this eye-witness is in danger herself. She is spying on an act of violence. Just like Jimmy Stewart does through his huge telephoto lens in Hitchcock's Rear Window, which takes place in New York. Where else but New York? (And Hitchcock, too, had a habit of slipping into his works; notorious voyeurs just can't seem to help doing that.) During the famous showdown at the end of the film, Jimmy Stewart, trapped in pitch dark, saves himself by using his camera's flash to blind his murderous neighbour. His camera, the object that got him into this precarious situation in the first place, suddenly becomes his weapon of self-defence. He changes sides; comes out into the open; stands up for himself.
And now, in Eva Leitolf's new work "The Spectators" we see the eye-witness face on, or rather: we see people like her - watchers, nosy spectators, moths in the floodlights. We watch all those buyers of telescopes, those standing on the sidelines who seek the comfort of strangers. Some people are only at home in their own visually filtered desire. Lonely people. Happy and consoled people. Like so many hundreds and thousands of others.
© Tobias Rüther
from: Eva Leitolf, The Spectators, Schaden.com 2006