‘Moritz’—a nod to the Morris column, as advertisement columns are also called—is Max Eyschen’s photographic research into the creation of meaning through the medium of the poster. The posters you see here are photographs of actual advertisement posters found throughout Amsterdam over the past few months. There have been no interventions or manipulations. Max uses the photograph simply as a framing device to create a new mosaic of posters. The composition is then left to its own abstraction, leaving the viewer with a laboratory of space and color.

Meaning always varies among different actors. In the case of the advertisement poster, its meaning changes continuously: for the creators of the poster itself, for the worker sticking the poster to the wall, and then again when nature and human interactions emerge. ‘Moritz’ is a reminder that the poster never stands on its own but is always a product of its environment. Exhibiting ‘Moritz’ in both gallery-like environments and urban spaces illustrates how both space and time intervene in creating meaning.

‘Moritz’ is an ongoing project attempting to create an archive of posters with endless possible meanings. Will you participate in creating this archive? The next time you wander through the city and you see a meaningful mosaic of posters: capture it and share it on instagram using the hashtag #ProjectMoritz.

Max Eyschen (1998, LU) shortly studied psychology and film and is now a Media and Culture student at the University of Amsterdam, with a specialization in TV and cross media. He is inspired by how Arts and Humanities relate to each other, and how culture intervenes and inspires. The concept of ‘Moritz’ was sparked by the series ‘A man dies in the street, Paris’ by Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï. The narrative way in which Brassaï records a growing and diminishing crowd around a corpse and eventually the paramedics who take it away, excited Max’s fascination for photography as a spatio-temporal medium.

@eyschenm