Images caught by a camera's eye do either have a documentary or staged character. Pictures made by Ana Bilankov can be read as documents. They lead one to assume that a piece of the real world is depicted. The evanescent brevity of one-hundredth of a second can be imagined, almost the twinkling of the photographer's eye when the scene now captured then lay in front of her. A baffling serendipity, measured by the infinity of life's moments, but still one guesses that in the life of Ana Bilankov this moment has a precise date and place.

Making a photographic image is a process of deduction. A motive was chosen from millions of images that form the totality of the visual world. And just like any person responsible for a deed, the photographer has a motif, which provides the meaning. The camera's viewfinder cuts out a rectangle from the photographer's entire field of vision. That one will be exposed. These distinctive moments in time - the "best" - are picked from a personal collection, the archive of exposed motifs, for the purpose of an exhibition. It is a process of separation, a parting that receives ultimate validity. Having lost paradise - which is the abundance of all possible images - the artist finds herself at the crossroads. With each question "Which one is my way?" she reduces her possibilities until she remains with a statement that claims universality and that solely has to represent all the previous assertions. A single word is chosen from the totality of language to designate these images: "Landed", "Park", "Waiting"... The photographs receive titles so exemplary as if Ana Bilankov was about to learn a new language by assigning concepts to images. Each concept speaks of an ultimate state of being. They represent focal points that open up the multiple vistas of the world anew.

In his "Brief history of time" Stephen Hawking describes reality as the sum of all possible events, which can be perceived in its fastest form - the speed of light - as an image, or distinctly slower - in the form of sonic waves - as sound. For every event in space-time we may construct a light cone (the set of all possible paths of light in space-time emitted at that event). Each individual cone of perception has a tip that points out one's personal position at a precise moment in space and time. Looking at the past, there are intersections with other people's cones of events and these intersections are again possible in the future. What lies beyond a cone of events, which expands with the speed of light, is what Stephen Hawking calls the absolute elsewhere.

The reproduction of an event, frozen by a camera, is definitely located in the past but in the form of a photography or a film it becomes the cross section of common memory. Ana Bilankov's images of the sea with a boat, of people in front of nothing but sky, of a path in a park are superimposed on my own images of "sea with boat" etc. And so I attach my own knowledge and my personal feelings of "sea with boat" to her image. I allocate meaning by measuring the difference of what I see and what I know or what I feel about it - the park is out of focus, the people in front of the sky have barely ground beneath their feet, the boat fades in and out of view across the sea, the horizon sways.

Until the 1980s artists working with photography had to limit themselves to small formats. Plotting in huge size did not yet come into being, neither was there an affordable possibility to enlarge, or photographic paper wide enough to create extensive images. Artistic photography was black and white. The conventions were shaped by coffeetable-books, or photography hung on gallery walls framed in small format. Due to the hanging at eye level, a certain distance to the images was maintained, which resembled the distance of looking at a book. An image was read. Consequently a bodily relation towards the image was reduced to the head, and the format that was seldom bigger than a human head, it pictured heads, faces or people much smaller than the spectator. There was no physical counterpart to the viewer, as opposed to film, a medium that with projection long since provided the possibility of a bodily experience of the image.

An initial positioning of the spectator in relation to the picture develops through the format. I try to comprehend it in its entirety and therefore need a distance that makes it possible to see all four sides of the image's rectangle simultaneously as a sharp contour. By leaving space between the spectator and the image, it is possible to find the viewpoint, which is also the vanishing point in the picture that is reflected in the space of the spectator. Then I take a second step towards the picture, because I am interested in the detail, the middle- and background. The format dictates the movement through the gallery space and the vanishing point causes the positioning of the spectator in the imaginary space of the picture.

Ana Bilankov entitles the first chapter of her catalogue "Places, Non-Places". Are these real locations or transitional locations that she is hinting at? Is this the ou-topos, "neverland", is it a commonplace, an archetype, or does she force the spectators to locate themselves? Does it make any difference whether she chooses photographs from her archive or enlarges found slides, that show a blurred green space, an allotment, or a park in which people walk along a path? The little that can be said about the physiognomy of these people, the less it seems that the path - in triplicate - leads to an end. I let myself be carried away into posing the question: Is the journey the reward? Where do the people in "Over the hill?" go to, in triple repetition? Or do they wait as in "Waiting"? Is this an attempt to kill the time between two events? Is this confusion my own? Have I just "Landed" in a world of airports, that look very much alike all-over the world?

The horizon sways, I try to level it out. The artist behind the camera is breathing. I have to breathe in her rhythm, much the same way that I have to find an eye level for her vanishing point. The horizon is the axis through which I can mirror myself in her image. On the line of the horizon my view meets the one of the artist.