Ebook: The Fourth Wall

“Nowhere else is there such devotion to cinema as in India,” says Belgian photographer Max Pinckers, whose self-published book, The Fourth Wall, explores the extraordinary impact Bollywood has on wider society. “This fictional world seeps into reality and influences everyday life, dictating the perception and imagination of its audience.”

So, with this in mind, and instead of focusing on the more obvious manifestations of Indian movie culture, such as advertising billboards or Bollywood bling, he turned the streets of Bombay into his own set, inviting passers-by to participate. “The people in these images become actors by choosing their own roles, which they perform for the camera and its western operator,” he explains.

“Conscious of the power of images, they give it their all, reflecting on their silver screen dreams by embracing their collective visual world and creating their own brief moments of suspension of disbelief.”

Using the language of documentary adds to this confusion of fact and fiction, capturing scenes in which it is unclear whether what we see is staged or a spontaneous moment. “A photograph of two men in uniform climbing over a fence, escaping,” for example, is “a re-enactment of a moment that just passed. They do it over again with great pride and pleasure.” For another tableau, “I read an article in the newspaper: two men use sleep-inducing gas to rob a struggling actress in her home, the same gas used in a 1972 hit film in which a cook robs his landlord. An image that I’ve been planning to make for some time comes to mind – a thick cloud of smoke in a bedroom film set.”

The book’s title refers to a different kind of rupture between reality and the celluloid world. “On a theatre stage that consists of three walls – left, right and back – the fourth wall forms the imaginary screen through which the audience sees the scene unfold. The actors, conscious of this barrier, tend to break through it now and then by hinting at their own fiction, acknowledging the camera and the act.” But now the 24-year-old has applied this concept to documentary photography by way of commenting on the paradoxes of his chosen medium.