From the mouth of Wu Ming 1

Wu Ming 1 explains the group's (Wiki) aversion to being photographed or filmed by the media:

"Once the writer becomes a face... it's a cannibalistic jumble: that face appears everywhere, almost always out of context. A photo is witness to my absence; it's a banner of distance and solitude. A photo paralyses me, it freezes my life into an instant, it negates my ability to transform into something else. I become a "character", a stopgap to hurriedly fill a page layout, an instrument that amplifies banality. On the other hand my voice - with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations - is witness to a presence even when I'm not there; it brings me close to people and doesn't negate my transformative capacity because its presence is dynamic, alive and trembling even when seemingly still."