When photographic apparatus was first conceived, it was thought of as a magic cave in which flowing appearances became fixed by wizardry. Then one did everything in order to participate in the inexplicable process that happened inside the black box, if only as a viewer. "Windows made of red glass," as William Henry Talbot suggested, "feed the curiosity."

Since then matters have changed, as Sandra Becker shows us in her piece Bildstrom (Flow of Images): the colorful glass is now murky, the black box is now white; only the unsharpness of early photography now remains. Like the passing of wisps of smoke, the shaped figures move upon the glassy surface. More appearances than images, diffuse and not localized, they appear out of the depths. The milky surface absorbs all details, colors, contrasts.

The relationships have also changed. It is no longer the photographic materials that need to be protected from the light, but rather the human being who needs to be protected from the shining images, for the sensitivity formerly belonging to those materials now belong to the human viewer.

Not only to minimize the everyday flood of images, but also to stop the flood of individuals, as in traffic, at least for awhile, Becker utilizes a strategy of distance. In her piece Rotation the actual distance from the objects is reflected within the image production. Becker first composed her view in Moscow from the roof of a skyscraper and caught short sequences using a video camera as a photo camera. Later from the video monitor, she photographed individual still images in order to create an arranged sequence movement of special manner. Its content does not seem to be related to the threat of city traffic (part of every pedestrians experience horizon), nor does it seem to be reflective upon ecological consequences. Instead, though the diminutive objects traveling the highway seem toy like, the direction of the traveling is disconcerting, being opposite to that from which text is normally read. This tension is heightened by the highway arrows appearing in all four stills.

That Becker communicates views we get used to is also evident in her video work Cluster. Here the signs seem to be completely out of control. The combinations of numbers and arrows form a myriad of new relationships with each other and with the surrounding architecture. On the one hand, the image and letter material seems to be just as it is. On the other hand, it seems to deal with views of spatial relations within the architectural context. Each semantic context is put together, then pulled apart; stopped, then moved. From the separated signs and images and the abundance of unordered semantic codes, a dynamification of the images is created, organizing their flow, their rhythm -- a process paralleled in music where to "cluster" means to put sounds on top of one another in small intervals.

In Global Departure Becker leans toward the aesthetic of train surveillance cameras, with their normative, total views. Her portrayal is of permanent repetition: waiting, boarding, departing. The video work Waiting Room depicts an even more cool inventory-taking view. Its falling perspectives, unsharpness and under-lighting, image repetitions and fast-forwards, creates that strange state of the individual that Becker calls "the poetic of waiting." This happens together with a diffused perception of "in-betweenness," wherein the concrete perceptions of time and space are dissolved into the perceived view of the waiting person.

Another metaphor upon which Cluster and also Perpetuum Mobile is based, and that depicts this experience of in-betweenness, is the simple elevator. Gradually, a view of individual, undifferentiated floors of a building is shown, and gangways, and endless rows of seats, all referred to by Becker in an accompanying poem. These are the urban spaces into which the "heroes of modern life" are spirited; these and the social hall, apartments, and workplaces found in anonymous, only functional buildings with immaculate directories for facilitating permanent movement within.

Such movement can be experienced on different levels, one being that a piece of work placed upon the floor of an exhibition space can be directly walked around. But the movement never arrives anywhere. It is an endless loop whose image rhythm directs the viewer's sensitivity of time.

Indeed, human beings are always in motion, as Becker deals with in the photo series Persona Grata. Whether observing persons riding the escalator in Moscow (as in that work) or whether casting the viewer into the state of in-betweenness, she is constantly searching for reflections of our "urban nature," to quote Germano Celant, amid the poetics and threats of everyday life. Usually ignored in the image flood of the mass media, her subjects are common, everyday people: the persona grata.