BENETTON
2004-present, film
2004, Chelsea thieves market, Sunday morning. Overloaded front table, sunglasses, cell phones, Viagra (sold by the pill, $10), assorted hot goods. Inaccessible back table, more of same, two 35mm film cans marked BENETTON.
‘Excuse me, what’s in those cans?’ ‘Twenty dollars.’ ‘Is there film in the cans?’ ‘Twenty dollars.’ ‘No, I want to know what is in the cans.’ ‘Twenty dollars.’
Twenty dollars later, four giant 16mm reels,color double-perforated reversal footage, three female models. An entire campaign shoot obviously orphaned or cast away footage now, curiously, in my hands. BENETTON is an ongoing imperfect series produced from an all too perfect source.
“The Benetton Series is an ongoing, probably lifelong project by Andrew Lampert built around 2.5 hours of discarded 16mm film footage from a mid-1990s Benetton advertisement shoot. Supermodels perform an endless series of interactions with the camera/viewer in a twisted ritual that, when viewed out of context, achieves a hypnotic beauty that no advertisement could ever recreate.”