One Naked Berliner Per Day, Passed Down the Chain

Berlin has around three and a half million people in it. At one photograph a day you’d need roughly ten thousand years to work through all of them—which is also about how long it takes to explain the city to someone who has never been. Prague-based artist Martin Gabriel Pavel is not attempting the census. His project Daily Portrait works on a chain: he photographs someone, that person photographs the next, who photographs the one after that, all of them naked or nearly so, the vulnerability passed along the line like a baton nobody gets to put back.

This is the fourth edition of a series Pavel has run in different cities, and Berlin is the obvious home for it. The city has a specific, almost administrative relationship with bodies—matter-of-fact, unsentimental, nobody making it a bigger deal than it is. The relay structure is what interests me most: you are subject before you are author, seen before you are allowed to see. The exposure is built into the contract, and everyone who agrees to it knows exactly what they’re agreeing to.

A year of this, one uncovered Berliner per day. You might recognize someone in there. You might want to be someone in there. Pavel is easy enough to find if you do.