Closer observation brings to light further discrepancies. We notice, for example, the roof of a pavilion extended in the background behind the scenario of the collapsed houses or the floor in the very foreground separating the scene of the seismic upheaval from the central area of the image. The photographs of Tatjana Hallbaum’s In-Between series are not of catastrophes that actually took place but of exercises in which personnel of the police, fire-fighting and civil defence departments train to cope with emergencies in situations simulated with the utmost realism. As the title suggests, the artist’s interest is focused on the space in between that separates reality and fiction. As the very nature of photography hinges on this paradox, she highlights the indivisibility of truth and falsity in representation and emphasizes the role of the viewer as always midway between complicit observation and detached appraisal.
This is how the artist describes her works and the intention underlying them: “The work is questioning the gap between ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’. It should show that photography circumvents this. The question is not what reality is, but how we can represent it.”

Tatjana Hallbaum (Germany, 1971)

A building flattened as though by an earthquake or bombing, an aircraft abandoned on the runway, a shed surrounded by burning cars with people lying on the ground in front of them as though dead: these are some of the grim scenarios shown from a slightly elevated viewpoint in Tatjana Hallbaum’s photographs. At the same time, however, they prove oddly artificial, wholly devoid of the customary atmosphere of frenzy and chaos that accompanies disasters of major proportions. What these carefully planned and composed images bring to mind is rather a scene on the stage in a theatre.