Free The Girl Who Wasn't There by Ferdinand von Schirach Page B

there from the airport. The reception was in the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde. The women wore long dresses, the men dinner jackets. Eschburg was bored. In the toilets, a young man was taking a line of coke; his left earlobe was stretched out of shape by a bright green silicon earring about twenty millimetres thick. Eschburg went out of the hotel and watched the traffic.
    Sofia was able to leave at about one a.m. A driver from the agency took them to her apartment, three tiny rooms in the 10th arrondissement. The first photo that Eschburg had ever taken of her hung over her bed. He had enlarged it to 1.50 by 1.50 metres. It was the only picture in her apartment. Sofia said she was so glad he had come. Then she dropped on the bed and fell asleep at once.
    There were sliding glass doors between the bedroom and the living room. He observed Sofia through the glass, and at the same time saw his own reflection: her face on his face. He stood like that for a long time, watching her as she slept.
     
    After the weekend he flew back to Berlin. He went to the State Library and looked for books about Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin’s, who was born in England in the early nineteenth century. Galton invented the weather map and identification by fingerprints. He was convinced that all criminals had visible characteristics distinguishing them from other people. Galton had wondered for a long time how he could illustrate those characteristics, and finally he set up his camera in a London prison and had prisoners brought in. He photographed all their faces on top of each other on a single photographic plate. Galton did not know what evil would look like – it could have shown in the eyes, the foreheads, the ears or the mouths of his subjects. He was astonished when he saw the photograph for the first time: there were no unusual characteristics, and the composite face of all those criminals was a beautiful one.
     
    Eschburg read a lot at this time, filling a book with his notes, and drawing sketches for an installation. After four weeks he booked thirty-eight women from a theatrical agency. His stipulations were few: all the women should be about the same size, they should be between eighteen and twenty-two years old, they were to be dress size 8, and they must be prepared to have nude photographs of themselves taken.
    A frame on a wooden platform forced the models to adopt the same physical attitudes for their heads and bodies. Eschburg photographed them one by one from in front with an 8 x 10 Deardorff camera on Polaroid, exposing the photos for fifteen seconds.
    The Polaroid pictures were pale grey and looked like soft pencil drawings. The long exposure time made all inessentials disappear, with only the lines of the women’s bodies and heads remaining visible. Later, Eschburg had the Polaroids scanned, enlarged to two square metres, and printed on thin Plexiglas plates.
     
    A young man who usually programmed video games for a software company now came to Eschburg’s studio every morning. He set up his computer, sat in front of a high-resolution screen, and programmed the installation to Eschburg’s instructions. Eschburg got him to explain the principles of his programming. After two months he bought the young man’s computer and worked on his own for another eight months. It was a year before the installation was finished. Things were easier with Sofia at this time; they got used to one another, and Eschburg thought he had found the right rhythm for this kind of relationship.
     
    Finally he showed the installation to his gallerist. Eschburg left him and Sofia alone in the studio and went into the inner courtyard. He sat on the steps outside the entrance and peeled an orange, carefully separating the segments. He held the naked fruit up to the sun, turned it, looked at the individual chambers in the flesh, the white skin, the thin veins, orange, yellow and red. He wondered how far it went back, that