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doing memory

2019, 28 photographies

EX UMBRIS ET IMAGINIBUS IN VERITATEM –

From shadows and images to truth (epitaph on Melaten, Cologne)

Our memory is brought forth through acts of remembering – “doing memory”, it is a performative process. In the process, an image appears in the here and now that makes us remember and brings us out ourselves in our transience.
The photographs in the work DOING MEMORY take up this theme at a time when we are confronted with the Corona pandemic.

An astonishing number of people are currently visiting cemeteries. The resting places for the dead reflect to visitors that death does not only affect the dead, but above all the living – they are places of communication. Do we create our identity only in the process of remembering and what emerges as an image? How can it be photographed?

With the help of a (coffin-like) pinhole camera and the special printing process of cyanotype, bluish images of figures on gravestones and shots of gardeners and gravediggers are created in analogue long exposures. The “doing memory” happens and materialises by means of this photographic strategy.

The past is never dead, it’s not even past” (W. Faulkner: “Requiem for a Nun”). (W. Faulkner: “Requiem for a nun”)

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Doing Memory, 2019
Picture size: 20 x 24 cm
framed 26 x 32 cm
Unique signed and
as print, Copies 25