P2 - Page 41
Read the essay ‘Archive Noises’ in Fontcuberta, J. (2014) Pandora’s Camera – Photogr@phy after
Photography, London: MACK, provided with your course materials.
Research point:
Read Sharon Boothroyd’s interview with Joachim Schmid at Link 1
Listen to Joachim Schmid talking about his collection and curation of discarded vernacular
photography at Link 2
P2 - Page
Read Allan Sekula’s essay ‘The Body and the Archive’ in Bolton, R. (ed.) (1992) The Contest of
Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.343–89. You’ll find this
on the student website (PH5DIC_ The Contest and Meaning_The Body and the Archive).
Also read:
Tim Clark’s interview with Erik Kessels on the vanishing photo album: Link 4
‘Archive Fever: Photography between History and the Monument’ by Okwui Enwezor: Link 5
P2 - Page 50
Read the essay ‘Fugitive Identities’ in Fontcuberta, J. (2012) Pandora’s Camera.
Watch Norwegian artist Vibeke Tandberg’s experimental self-portraiture employing
photomontage techniques at Link 9
P2 - Page 56
Read ‘New Media and Vernacular Photography: Revisiting Flickr’ by Susan Murray in Lister, M.
(ed.) (2013) The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Abingdon: Routledge (pp.165–82), which
is provided with your course materials.
Also read:
• David Chandler’s essay on Mishka Henner’s Dutch Landscapes at Link 10
• ‘When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets’ by Annebella Pollen
at Link 11
Sharon Boothroyd - Transcript YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4FTYM66kAA
0:37
[Music] Well, thanks for the introduction and thanks for inviting me to participate in
0:42
this event, uh, I prepared a little thing, uh introducing you to several works
0:51
I've been doing during the past uh 40 years, or so uh, the majority of my works are based
0:59
on everyday photographs uh, and these photographs are not just the raw material for the work
1:07
but they are also the topic of the work uh when I started working with this
1:13
type of imagery, we have to keep in mind that we were in a completely different situation
1:20
let's say in Europe in the early 1980s, uh, the photographic world was very
1:26
much concerned with proving the point that photog photography can be art that
1:33
was the big topic because most museums did not yet collect photographs, and uh
1:39
the status of Photography as an art form was questioned by many people
1:45
by like I the established art world uh I always had uh, let's say doubts about
1:52
this attitude is because it's pretty evident that Photography can be art, but
1:58
the interesting point is it can be much more than art, and uh, I focused on that portion
2:07
of the photographic production that was not considered art, so now uh selection
2:12
of Works um one project Builder from Thea pictures from the street started in a
2:21
casual way, and uh, it was not
2:27
meant to be an artwork in the beginning, it is precisely what the title suggests: a collection of all photographs I've
2:34
been founding in public space over 30 years uh at the time when I started
2:43
working on this, I was editing a little magazine, and for the magazine, I was
2:48
writing an article about photographic collections in Germany, and I visited all
2:53
the collections and studied what they would include in their collections uh and
3:01
we we we came to a pretty clear out non
3:06
outspoken Canon of Photography that is worth collecting, and that, of course, brings us also to the collection what to
3:13
the question what do they not collect? What is what is not included so they
3:19
collect what they call good pictures good photographs and I said well, why don't
3:24
you also collect bad photographs to get a complete picture of what Photography is. Collect the good
3:30
photographs collect some of the bad photographs, and then we have a pretty complete View while I was writing
3:37
that, uh, walking through the city, I saw a snapshot lying on the pavement. I picked
3:42
it up. I looked at it. I dropped it again and kept on walking, and 10 minutes later
3:48
It came to my mind, and well, this is precisely what we were looking for. This is the perfect lousy photograph. It must be so bad
3:55
It was so disturbing that somebody had ripped and thrown it out. I ran back
4:02
to where it was, I didn't find it. It was Gone with the Wind, and from that day on
4:08
I started picking up and collecting all the photographs. I found that there was no selection and no
4:16
editing it an all-inclusive approach because I was interested to learn what's
4:22
out there, I was not interested in pointing out what I liked about
4:28
them in the beginning, it was a rather casual thing, but slowly, the more
4:34
photographs, I found it turned into a life-changing Obsession. It changed my perception of
4:40
the urban space, I didn't look at cities anymore, but I looked like a travel pick
4:46
at the pavement searching for discarded photographs, so my attention was completely
4:53
shifted, and I was focusing on photographic garbage. and the more I
4:59
looked for it, the more I found the majority of the photos I found
5:05
were recovered but intentionally discarded. I find them interesting; both
5:12
as visual artifacts and documents of human life, I know nothing about these
5:19
photographs except when and where I found them. Everything else is up for
5:26
imagination, and your guess is as good as
5:31
mine, the pictures were thrown out because something went wrong either with
5:37
the photo itself or the life of the people depicted, we do not know what went
5:43
wrong with this couple, but something did likely go
5:49
wrong. We don't know what went wrong inside this photo booth, but the result
5:55
is an outstanding photograph artist used to make this this kind of
6:02
stuff some photos achieved a particular quality after they were exposed to
6:07
sunlight and Rain, people stepped onto pictures or cars drove over them, and these
6:14
interactions add another quality to the pictures. Many photos were ripped up it's
6:21
a voodoo-like act like sticking a needle into a
6:27
doll, there's a lot of human energy spent on the destruction of those
6:33
pictures, and that indicates how important it must have been for somebody to get rid of
6:40
all the ripped-up pictures were reassembled as well as
6:46
possible, and although this project is a study of anonymous discarding
6:52
photographs, it is a very personal work. In a way, it is my own
6:58
I can retrace my wanderings through the world over 30 years. Looking at these pictures, they
7:05
just work like any snapshots I would have taken myself, so it's my family
7:12
album The pictures remind me of my 30-year Journey Through the
7:17
the world after many years of collecting, I thought about completing the project, but
7:24
I didn't know how to do this. Uh, eventually, the success story of
7:30
digital cameras brought it to an end by pushing the delete button to replace the
7:35
act of ripping up pictures, so this is the last photograph
7:41
I found uh after the number had uh decreased dramatically in the last years
7:48
of the project, and after 30 years and the 1,000 photographs I found, I decided
7:55
this is the end. All the pictures were mounted on board
8:00
entitled with the place and date of the finding, and in exhibitions, they are always presented in the chronological
8:06
order of the findings, but presenting the entire project is virtually impossible. It would
8:13
require something like 300 running meters of a gallery wall
8:19
you don't get that anywhere, uh, so I decided to make
8:25
a random selection is a cal calculation of how many running meters of
8:31
the wall I have, and then it's divided by how many pictures I can show, and then the number of pictures I have is divided
8:38
by the number of available spaces and on, so it's every third or every sixth or every
8:44
seventh out of the ongoing Series, so the installation looks different every time it's being
8:50
installed the entire project, including all 1,000 photographs, was also published
8:56
as a set of books, um, I learned a lot about bookmaking before making
9:03
that I had contacted several Publishers and offered them this project
9:09
and everybody, if they ever cared to reply at all, uh, sent me something like
9:17
H and after a while, I seriously thought about that and said well, Yim, if you were
9:24
a publisher would you publish that, and the answer was no
9:29
because it's evident that this is expensive, and nobody will buy it. I mean, very few, minimal number
9:36
of people, uh, and then I decided that's great, but because I'm not a publisher, I
9:41
can do it, and uh, fortunately, at that time uh print on demand became something
9:49
like a feasible option, and I said okay, I don't care about print quality; I don't care about a particular Paper
9:55
Stock I just want to get this damn thing out, and so I produced it
10:01
um, all 1,000 photographs are in there in their original size, uh, with the captions
10:10
You mentioned the date and place where they were found, and that's it no comment, no
10:16
nothing, and I'm happy with it. I don't care whether it's uh out there in
10:21
Fifty copies or 500 copies doesn't make any difference to me. I don't think that books that sell 500 copies are
10:27
It's better than books that sell copies uh quickly. I want to introduce
10:33
another project I did in the 1980s and '90s was also something like a
10:40
longtime project, I was interested in identifying repetitive patterns in
10:46
photography, you know, similarities become very obvious when you look at many photographs. Uh we
10:54
don't learn at school how to take pictures, and our parents don't tell us either, but somehow, we all have had
10:59
taken very similar pictures, and I was interested in identifying the patterns that we or more
11:07
or less uh unconsciously uh reproduce, so when I found these four postcards in one
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postcard rack, uh, things became so clear that I decided to explore photographic
11:22
uh similarity in broadly and systematically, and I already had
11:27
gathered a large amount of photographs such as postcards, newspaper photos
11:32
commercial photographs, personal snapshots that you have, and I grouped these uh according to various uh similar
11:41
features similarities in pictures, of course, mirror uniform social rituals for
11:48
a wedding the Bri the bride is dressed in white the man wears dark the woman stands at the man's right side flowers
11:55
are obligatory, and so on. Nothing has changed in decades
12:01
children are a common Motif in snapshots, and their training in Role Models is depicted in many
12:09
photographs Studio photos that are made to commemorate the rights of Passage player
12:16
role religious holidays are photo opportunities resulting in similar
12:22
Picture travels are among the most common reasons for taking
12:27
snapshots of possessions and Acquisitions are presented as signs of success and
12:36
wealth an entire industry turns out unassuming
12:42
Collectible surveillance cameras capture details of
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moments lifestyle magazines celebrate
12:54
consumerism trade catalogues stimulate consumption with standardised photos of
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standardised dreams, and there's an enter supply of similar photographs I collected
13:06
thousands of them and the several several hundreds of these panels, we never see just a single
13:13
photograph but all groups of them, and in exhibitions, we see groups of
13:19
groups so alt together this project is an encyclopedia of uncreative
13:25
Photography, and as happy as I was with many of those panels, there were two
13:32
problems I uh was not satisfied with one problem was at at that at the time I mean we
13:38
talk about the Internet, uh age of physical pictures at that time, you
13:45
had limited access. Even, you know, when I went to the flea market every weekend, I would return maybe with a
13:52
few hundred photographs, but to assemble a visually convincing panel, you need a
13:57
a large number of pictures, and you shuffle them around until it's well balanced with colour and contrast and
14:04
sizes and proportions and what you have, but the other problem I had was
14:10
working with flea market imagery, I was almost something like half a century behind my own time, and I found more
14:18
and more problematic because I was more interested in working on my own time than in solving my grandfather's
14:26
problems uh so um, I concluded that, and
14:33
10 years later, I returned to the same questions, but of course, the situation
14:39
had changed dramatically, so my picture pool was this
14:46
side photos sharing side flicker gives us virtual access to an unlimited
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number of photographs, the number number of uploads
15:00
had increased so dramatically that every single day, more photographs were being
15:06
uploaded than any human being could ever look at in a
15:12
lifetime, the problem with these pictures is that they are only potentially
15:17
accessible; actually, most of them are not because the PE people upload them
15:24
without adding descriptions, captions or tags
15:30
and the search engine will never find them, so let's say somebody searches for
15:37
a photograph of a black and white cow standing in a Dutch landscape in front of Wind
15:43
generators, the one to the left will never be picked up unless somebody
15:48
searches for P10 10815, which is somewhat unlikely to
15:55
happen to make things worse if there are captions, they are often to
16:02
useless, so this flan, which is something like a
16:08
a mix of Italian and English and fantasy and the piz
16:14
Tower you; you get the point
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yep, I don't have to, so how did I work? Uh, fortunately, there was this side
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it doesn't exist anymore. I compiled my Series using this site and presented a
16:35
random selection of photos uploaded in the previous
16:42
the minute a few years later, flicker replaced the random selection by the algorithm called interestingness, and the
16:49
the result is a selection of predictable, pretentious American photos that absolutely
16:55
useless for my type of work, so for the first time in history, we were
17:01
able to look at photos in large numbers soon after they were made, I looked at this site for many
17:09
hours every day, refreshing the page every couple of seconds, and whenever I
17:15
discovered a photo I found potentially interesting, I downloaded it, thus creating a picture pool of thousands of
17:22
Photographs The photographs I looked at were presented to me randomly, and that
17:27
was perfect, as I did not have a preconceived list of subjects or patterns I was looking for
17:35
but I was curious to watch what people produced and shared as it was just more of the
17:42
same that we knew already knew or were their new patterns and when my pool was big enough
17:49
I started sorting photos, eventually identifying between three and 400
17:54
frequently recurring motifs and patterns, and I'll show you a selection of them
18:00
now, people photograph themselves in various ways, either holding a camera
18:05
at arm's length or in the mirror world, the word selfie was not yet invented in
18:12
2008, often it's not just the person with the camera but also their
18:17
body, the photographer's Shadow is a very common Motif. The camera is pointed downward
18:25
often attracted by shoes or freshly painted nails
18:30
other people's feet seem to be interesting for many people's other body parts, as
18:40
well, the no photo hand is as welcome an opportunity as a photo of the person behind the
18:48
hand again travelling is a significant topic people by a car going by car photograph
18:56
the road and what they see along the
19:01
road landmarks along the road, and if there's nothing interesting
19:08
there, they turn again to themselves in the mirror. There's also stuff inside the car
19:14
to be photographed, and upon arrival, it's the parking
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lot of people going by plan start by photographing the
19:26
plane and the documents they need for travelling once the helicopter is Airborne
19:34
passengers follow its itinerary; they photograph the meals that
19:39
are served on the aircraft. After their arrival, they photograph their hotel
19:46
rooms also the view from the [Music] room and in the evening is the sunset of
19:55
course, then the attractions they came to see and to f photograph and their interactions with
20:02
these attractions and the one picture in the
20:09
Museum and postcards will soon be a thing of the past because sending photos by phone is so much cheaper and
20:17
faster, and don't forget to ensure where you are and take a photo of the
20:22
spot so much for travelling uh at home; people photograph their processions
20:29
all their valued collections, the contents of their
20:36
wardrobes, their handbags, the contents of their
20:43
handbags, the things they do in their Leisure Time, the bread they
20:51
bake the food they eat, the fast food they
20:57
consume the pizza they got delivered and their birthday
21:05
cakes, the coffee they drink and eventually, the place where all
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this ends up interactions with other species are a
21:17
the thing in particular, if killing is involved while photographs are often
21:23
trophies themselves. They also show trophies and encounters with little animals
21:29
we do not kill, and of course, the animals people live
21:36
with and the wanted posters when one of them gets lost and finally, uh, one of my favourite
21:44
trophies found in the process, a collection of the first photos people take
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when buying a new camera, uh, it's usually the Box the camera came
21:54
in uh, so for each of those categories, I had the same number of photographs
22:00
selected and again used print-on-demand technology and turned each of those
22:06
categories into one book, uh, always showing nicely balanced double Pages, uh
22:13
for each one uh and Al together, this forms a library of contemporary everyday
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Photography in 96 volumes uh in exhibitions this library
22:26
is presented in a simple, minimal form of installation adapted to the respective
22:33
space, and after showing this several times, I noticed uh something super
22:38
It is interesting uh that people spend much more time up in a book exhibition than
22:44
they do it in a traditional Gallery where you have pictures on the wall, you know, when somebody enters a gallery, they kind
22:50
of look around like, Okay, saw the exhibition, and in book exhibitions, I
22:57
watched people spending three hours going from book to
23:02
book, and from Page to Page, I found that super interesting. I assume the
23:08
the reason is that it involves uh the own activity physical activity of look
23:15
Turning the page looking going whereas just turning your head is a different
23:22
thing so uh, while working on a project, I had the reading room of Monastery in in
23:29
mind as an ideal uh place of um installation and my favourite
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installation was this one actually in the former U Monastery in Italy was the
23:41
It's just like the perfect uh spot. So, in the beginning, I mentioned that I had
23:47
identified several hundred categories, but only 96 of them were eventually selected
23:52
and the other ones I discarded, but I did return a few of them for
23:58
individual projects, and I want to show you two of them to conclude this uh talk
24:05
here, uh, one project is based on a group
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uh of snapshots that are, photographically speaking, rather
24:16
uninteresting, so I discovered I came across photographs showing people
24:22
standing in the middle of the road by a painted on the pavement
24:28
and I wondered what's happening there, so some of you may recognise the
24:36
building in the background is the former School Book Depository at D Plaza in Dallas
24:42
Texas is the assassination side of John Kennedy, so you may wonder why it would
24:50
somebody wants to have their picture taken at the place where somebody was shot, but that's a different question and
24:56
while checking out what's happening there, I came across this webcam, which is
25:02
positioned at the spot that is encircled there, right where the Assassin was
25:08
standing so the camera's perspective exactly matches the perspective of the
25:15
shooting, and we can watch the footage of this webcam pointing at The X, which is
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visible in the basement back there down there and I used this watching
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tourists taking photographs, so every uh day around the same time, I watch this W webcam for
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about half an hour, and whenever I encountered one of those uh moments
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where somebody was happening, I would take screenshots of the webcam, so this is what happens there on an average Day
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on a busy day, it can look like
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this, you know, and this is, you know, this is not a small
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Road This Is A Highway onramp there's. There there's traffic going on, so PE
26:04
people risk their lives to get the picture taken in that spot it's I found it
26:10
absolutely
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incredible, so from these collected screenshots
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uh I selected a number of them, focusing on photographic moments and
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showing a bit of the drama happening on the page and turned them into uh black and white prints, um
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and I combined these in a book with the found snapshots taken by
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pictures in the very same position, and my photographs show the
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process of making photographs, and then we have the resulting images to be found on
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photos sharing sides a bit of the trauma that's happening on this
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spot and some snapshots without any
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drama, and you may wonder you know why somebody wants to get
27:21
photograph at the place where another person was shot, and I I wanted to, and then I
27:30
found this. I don't know why I felt the need to
27:36
stand by the X, but judging from everyone else, it would appear to be the thing to
27:42
do, and I think this is the perfect caption for 99% of the photographs you
27:48
find on photos sharing sites; people take pictures for no particular reason except
27:55
that it appears to be the thing to do, and that is super interesting that has not happened, let's say, in analog
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photography is something that only happens in the world of digital mass
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production now, uh, for the last work I made using other people's photographs, the
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watch uh, just as in the previous years, the pictures themselves are visually
28:20
not very interesting, but exploring them brings us to an
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environment that is a rather peculiar territory, so before I came across these
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I had no idea that some people own more than one wrist. BR: uh, well, there are. I learned that there
28:41
are such people, and many of them have many watches, usually costly ones, and they love to show them
28:49
off so this is a small part of one man's collection, uh another one with a bit
28:56
more tidy approach, and people even start photographing their desired objects
29:01
before they own them, and once they have them, they photograph them often at their
29:10
wrist as opposed to professional photographers, who always set a watch to 10 10 amateurs usually do not pay
29:17
attention to the time shown on the face of the watch so during the COVID-19 lockdown
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our relationship with time Chang changed, and people who were used to you
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know to sell their time, they suddenly had to come up with a different model. They were at home and had to
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rethink their idea about the time of sale, and I used the time for searching
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and downloading photographs of wristwatches and then, after months of looking
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at other people's watches, I organised their photos in chronological order of the time shown on the watch so it starts
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at noon and one minute later and another
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minute, so I had hoped to achieve a complete collection of 720 consecutive photos, one for each
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minute in 12 hours. Again, the problem is you need help to search for these pictures. You just can
30:16
find them, and hardly anybody adds captions to a photo that mentions the time shown on the
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watch, so I didn't quite get 720, but I stopped at
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548 when I was physically no longer able to read the time of a
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watch, and then I turned these uh photographs in a thick pocketbook with
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720 pages, one Page for each
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minute, and ideally, the readers would look at the book very slowly, turning a
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page once a minute, so it would take about 12 hours to study that book
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and it also exists as an installation with 548 small prints presented in 12
31:04
lines of 60 frames each, and the empty slots are the missing minutes in the
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book, they are blank pages, so that's the time, and uh, if I'm not entirely wrong
31:17
It's about time to go to dinner. thank you
31:24
[Music] you [Laughter]
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[Music] [Laughter]
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[Music] [Laughter]
31:43
[Music]
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