Meet the People

Functioning as both a fake documentary and a fake advertisement, Meet the People deals with issues of desire, complicity, and identity in the age of mass media, as 14 “characters” talk about their lives, desires, and dreams.

“The fictions of the self overtly concern Shelly Silver in her tour-de-force Meet the People. In video verité style, she swiftly inter-cuts what appear to be her interviews of 14 individuals representing contemporary New York types: a cabby, a waitress, a housewife, a stripper, an Italian construction worker, a black army officer. At the end the credits reveal that all 14 are actors and all were apparently reading Silver’s script. Silver wittily questions the very idea of the authentic—ultimately, she implies, ‘personal truth’ is a momentary and collaborative invention, a triborough bridge between actor, author-director, and audience—on TV and on the street.”

—Anne Hoy, Speechless (New York: International Center of Photography, 1989)