Semjase’s Friend
In Schmidrüti, a small village near Zurich, lives the only person who is in direct contact with aliens. At least, that’s what he claims. As proof, ‘Billy’ Eduard Albert Meier has an extensive collection of photographs and videos that show spaceships and other traces of alien contact in unusually high quality. Through photography, the Swiss-man has constructed a fictitious reality that offers his many loyal followers worldwide answers to their problems and questions of life.
We see and we believe, even though we know that the image is probably manipulated. We hesitate, but go along with it anyway: ‘After all, Billy saw them, just look at the pictures’.
In ‘Semjase’s Friend’, photographer Silas Bahr combines documentary photographs taken in Switzerland with staged or fake images. In doing so, he shows that what is experienced as a representation of reality is a flawed story, coloured by the author’s imagination and ideas.
