Gerling crisscrossed Germany over a period of 14-plus years, walking more than 2,000 miles taking portraits of people and places he met along the way. He shot each subject quickly — taking 36 shots in just 12 seconds, so that he could capture the unself-conscious moments between poses — and then bound the images from each shoot into a little flipbook. To share the photos with audiences, he places each book under an overhead projector and flips through the pages, and what we see on the large onstage screen is a “moving picture” of the multiple shifts that can occur over a short time in a face or a landscape.
Sounds simple, but it’s so not. He places each book on the projector with great gentleness, as if respecting the life contained therein. He flips through the pages of almost every book three times, always with exquisite precision so that we don’t miss a moment. And each time we watch it, we see a new detail, something we didn’t notice the first or even second time through.
That’s true of even the most impassive subjects. In one hilarious sequence, he shows us a flipbook portrait of two boys taking a break from fishing — they don’t move a muscle, facial or otherwise, over the course of the 36 shots. So, in order to prove that multiple photos were indeed taken, he asks us during the next flip-through to watch the blade of marsh grass to their right — and sure enough, it does move slightly, even though the boys, showing either remarkable poise or remarkable boredom, don’t.
Some subjects seem determined to maintain a neutral expression, but then there’s a sudden change, like a flash of sunlight. An elderly man in a baseball cap marked “Berlin” looks skeptical but turns positively elfin when he doffs his hat and grins. Our perception of a deadpan teenaged boy and two girls alters when the boy kisses one of the girls, leaving the other to look out at the camera bereft, or at the very least embarrassed. He photographed one freckled-faced girl both as a youngster and as a 20something woman — and tells us how her attitude toward her freckles changed with age.
Soft-spoken and lightly accented, he introduces many of the portraits with such anecdotes, though he lets us look at the portraits in silence. The effect can be hypnotic — the flipping pages, the soft German voice — so it’s possible you might doze off. But try not to. You’ll miss a chance to reflect on how much there is to see — in strangers, in strange places, in each other — if we just pay attention.
This article appears in Oct 19-26, 2017.