The Extras

A photographer lands on a film set in Bollywood to photograph the decors as part of his PhD research in the arts. Posing as an extra, he infiltrates the set of Tezz, a ''romantic terrorist'' film, where nothing goes as he had imagined. During the shoot, among 30 other extras and with surrealistic Bollywood featured as the backdrop, he enters into conversations about photography and society with the overpopulated and poverty-stricken Mumbai. In The Extras, photographer and professor of photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp Bert Danckaert (b. 1965) explores the doubt and incapacity that drive the artistic process. Inspired by his 2013 project Simple Present, these pages also reflect on the oeuvre of photographers working along the boundaries of fiction and reality in a globalized world, where it is increasingly difficult to take a clear position (or photographic point of view).