The Graz-based artists’ group G.R.A.M. has been working on its paparazzi series for over a decade, making an independent contribution to the “end of privacy” conjured up by the media. By mixing self-taken pictures of real stars and celebrities with photographs of unknown people, common mechanisms of reality construction are sensitively disturbed. The images “shot” in places like Hollywood, New York, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, London, Vienna, Berlin or Graz simulate realities that exist only in the minds of the viewers. The internalised codes of the mass media make it easier to go down false paths, into grey zones between reality and appearance. The game with (pretended) sensations, with voyeurism, deception and media laws experiences a dramatic reinterpretation in the shots of boring everyday scenes from the immediate neighbourhood: the ordinary is charged with secrets through the paparazzi aesthetic. Fact” becomes “fiction”.

G.R.A.M. (Günther Holler-Schuster, *1963, Martin Behr,* 1964) live and work in Graz, Austria.