“On foot or by car, Martin kept moving along the streets, from Venice Beach to the Hollywood Hills, from downtown to East L.A., creating a portrait of the city that has become a hologram of the film industry. Martin’s photo series, L.A. Crash, cryptically subverts the established clichés and images streaming out of the flood of media: panoramas of burning high-rises, uniformed cops handcuffing African-American gangsters, graffiti-covered courtyards, or lethargic homeless people on the sidewalk. The photographs seem to come from a bank of cinematographic memories, in which glossy optics are celebrated fetishes in an inexhaustible world of pictures. ‘It’s about getting into the fiction that is America, America as fiction. After all, it is as this fiction that it rules the world.’ Martin intensifies the effects of simulation (in Jean Baudrillard’s sense of the word) by adding another layer of motifs to L.A. Crash. He mixes shots of actual streets with motifs from film productions (including costumed actors and staged disasters), which he happens to come across in public. However, the question of what is authentic and what is constructed always remains open. This blurs the line between documentary and staged photography.”

from: Sarah Frost, “Where is the Cinema?”, in: Hilke Wagner, Kunstverein Braunschweig (Ed.), Mirko Martin - Marginal Stories, Exhibition catalogue, Remise of the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany 2009