Dias & Riedweg

The CameraContact project is an immersion into Charles Hovland’s photographic archives. For nearly twenty years, the New York photographer captured the secret desires of thousands of anonymous people who had replied to an ad in the Village Voice between 1985 and 2005. Meanwhile, he was also producing innumerable shoots for gay magazines. The duo Dias & Riedweg revisited this huge archival fund by transforming the analog material into an installation comprising photographs, films and digital video devices. Presented in an apartment comparable to the one in which Charles Hovland lives and works, the exhibition confronted viewers with extremely intimate fantasies from a time when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak.