978-94-90322-68-7

Thomas Soete

80

17 x 23 cm

Softcover

English

Translation Rosie Heinrich

Proofreading Aaron Bogart

This publication was originally published in Dutch in 2013 by EPO, paperback, 117 pages.

Date of release: Fall, 2016, September/October

Bert Danckaert is POC (Piece of Cake) member, an international network of contemporary photographers.

This publication is in part the result of the PhD research project Simple Present at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, AP University College, Antwerp and is published with their support.

A photographer lands on a film set in Bollywood. He wants to photograph the décors as part of his PhD research in the arts. Posing as an extra, he infiltrates the set of Tezz, a romantic terrorist film. But nothing goes as the photographer had imagined. In among thirty other extras, he winds up on the least photogenic set. During the long day's shoot he enters into various conversations about photography and society, with the overpopulated and poverty-stricken Mumbai and its surrealistic Bollywood featured as the backdrop.

The Extras is about how doubt and incapacity drive the artistic process. The book is also a reflection on the oeuvre of photographers working along the boundaries of fiction and reality in a globalized world, where it is increasingly difficult to take a clear position (or photographic point of view).

Bert Danckaert is a photographer and professor of photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He received a PhD in 2014 from the University of Tilburg (NL), with his thesis The Extras and photography book Simple Present (published by Lannoo).