Photographer Thomas Demand at SFMOMA

Berliner Thomas Demand received academic training in sculpture, but photographs have made his name in the international art world.

I was surprised to find him represented by what looks like a video piece in "Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Projected on a high screen near the end of the exhibition, it describes a video surveillance camera sweeping the space below, from which viewers see it. A few moments' attention to the piece reveals that, as with Demand's stills, he has fabricated everything we see in it.

I talked with Demand about his work and the exhibition when he came to San Francisco recently to conduct a master class at California College of the Arts, as a guest of the Pilara Foundation.

Q: I know only your still photographs. When did you start doing moving images and why?

A: In 1998, I was invited by the Tate to do a piece for their Project Room. I did a piece about a tunnel. It was the year after the accident in Paris that killed Princess Diana, but I proposed it the year before. So I decided I had to change it to a camera moving through a building, because after the accident, everybody would think it was about the accident. ... Later I played around with animation a lot, so this is actually not a video in that sense, it's single pictures. For that reason, it's also very sharp, sharper than a video image would be. There are 780 individual pictures. The nicest moment, of course, is when you have the reflection in the camera glass.

Q: Yet that's the moment when it looks most artificial ...

A: But I like it because you have the movement of the fake video camera and the movement of the real camera, the handheld camera I used to take the pictures. So you have the movement of two cameras at the same time for every picture. ... The point is that with a photograph, as opposed to film, you can look at it very closely, and it reveals itself as being not what you thought it was, but as a construction.

Q: There's a sound component here also?

A: Yes, that's the other moment when the piece reveals itself as total fabrication. It should be a little bit louder, then you could hear that it's actually nonsense language, but it sounds like the sort of announcement we hear in very public interior spaces.

Q: How long did it take you to make this piece?

A: About two months.

Q: Were you working on other things at the same time?

A: No, just this one thing.

Q: I was surprised to find you in this exhibition. Were you surprised to be invited to participate?

A: Yes, I was. But in the end, it's not my role to judge whether my work belongs in it. ... Basically what they invited me to do was the exit shot, the last thing you see. At Tate Modern, my piece was the last thing you saw, which seemed quite a reasonable thing. It's not the same here, but I had no control over that.

Q: Did I overhear you remark to someone about the inclusiveness of the show?

A: Yes, you could really put anything in it.

Q: Let me ask you then about the choice of what your photographs depict, since they are all complete fabrications. Are they based on your observation of the world?

A: Very often they are based on other people's photographs. For example, the tunnel piece I mentioned earlier came out of observing many photographs of the Paris tunnel where the fatal accident occurred. It struck me then that everybody knows a little bit about this nondescript tunnel in Paris. It has this weird quality of putting us all on the same level of information, which is very different from 30 years ago. I find it very interesting to what extent pictures become our surroundings and to what extent they determine our ideas of the world.

I like the paparazzi pictures in the show because they are like a bastardized moment of something of public interest. Also, you are reminded how young this idea is of stars being photographed in this way.

Q: Have you ever used a camera surreptitiously?

A: No, because I'm not really a photographer. I studied sculpture. That's why I make the things I construct life size. I hate small models.

Q: Was there a turning point where photographs took over your interest in sculpture?

A: When I tried to document what I found beautiful or remarkable about my sculpture, I found that the photographs just couldn't do it. So there was a time when I was making two of each sculpture, one to exist in real space and a second to meet the needs of the camera. And this got me to rethinking my relationship to photographs ... until I realized I could make sculpture that would show what the camera's actually doing to reality. {sbox}

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera Since 1870: 11 a.m.-5:45 p.m. Fri.-Tues., 11 a.m.-8:45 p.m. Thurs. $9-$18. (Free first Tuesday of each month.) Through April 17. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., S.F. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org.

E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page Q - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle