Last week’s NY Art Book Fair at Moma PS1 was visited by 27.000 people. About 23.000 of them were dressed incredibly well for book people, but maybe that’s normal for the combined crowd of the bookish and the artsy and New York.
One of the 27.000 people who sauntered past the table I was manning (Spector Books) was Travis, a young guy, who went straight for Tobias Zielony’s “Jenny, Jenny,” a series of photographs of prostitutes on the streets of Berlin. I told Travis the story behind the photographs (Zielony met a girl on the subway and asked whether he could take her picture. She turned out to be a sex worker at Kurfürstenstraße and he began to portray her and her colleagues). I was distracted by how much this seemed to shock or impress him and by his bewilderment about the fact that prostitution is legal in Germany. I asked him what he did in life and he didn’t know how to answer. I only realised how young he was (and that he was still going to school) when he told me a story, too. “Do you want to know something?” he asked, and when I didn’t hear him over the din of the paper hullabaloo, he said again: “Do you want to know something?” “What?” “I came home one night and my dad had called over a hooker. She was maybe like two or three years older than me, 19 or 20. He just sat there and hollered at me and said bring me a can of beer will you. That was weird. He’s basically a good guy though.”
Travis ended up at PS1 because his teacher had brought the whole class to see the fair. He asked me what kind of music I liked, Kraftwerk? (his kinda savvy attempt of making a connection to German culture). I said Kanye West (my awkward attempt at bridging a generational gap, although I wasn’t lying). Then he asked whether he could take my picture and directed me to stand in front of a wall with a pink poster.
Later that day he came back to the table to say goodbye. “Bye, Eva.”