Max Pinckers

The Fourth Wall (2012)

The Fourth Wall is Max Pinckers’s strategy for taking the viewer into the heart of Mumbai. A city of hardship for many, Mumbai has often been portrayed by photographers through depiction of precarious conditions: the lives  of sex workers and child labourers for instance. Pinckers sets himself a very different challenge, perhaps one that is even more empathetic, which is to visualize how human beings creatively survive and escape such difficult realities. Pinckers acknowledges that The Fourth Wall book (which Pinckers considers the primary form of the project) works in its ‘very fine balance’ between the cinematic and the real in order that it can tell a story of magical realist power, of unexplained wonders and drama that are rendered from actual lives and experiences.

Based on a text by Charlotte Cotton