The Catch

What's the catch? — that quiet question every transaction carries underneath. I wanted to take it literally: if there is always a catch, let it be a fish.

 

Six collages, six everyday situations — a handshake, an embrace, a meeting, a rivalry, a piece of small talk, an introduction. In each one, a fish has been placed exactly where the unspoken thing in the room would otherwise sit. People close a deal around a pufferfish. A couple dances with a fish between them. Two women hold the same fish without letting go. No one in the picture reacts. The fish is treated as ordinary.

 

The source images are press photographs from the late 1940s — composed, well-mannered, slightly stiff. That decorum is the joke. I kept the original faces and gestures untouched, and repainted the suits in early-twentieth-century Japanese woodblock patterns, the loudest fabric I could find.