A Passionate Practice, Peter Watkins’s "The Unforgetting"

By Benedetta Casagrande

Developed between 2010-2017, Peter Watkins’ project The Unforgetting looks at the photographer’s German family history and at the trauma of the loss of his mother as a child.  ‘The Unforgetting’ could be understood either as a noun or as a verb. Whilst the former refers to ‘he/she who does not forget’, reflecting the storage of a passive, crystallized set of memories whose symbolic and affective meanings are predetermined (much like in Lois Lowry’s dystopian children novel The Giver), the latter points to an active process of reversal of forgetting; an undoing of a state of oblivion defined by fluidity, movement and the negotiation of meaning. Watkins’ project and recent photobook belongs to the second definition. But how does one reverse the process of forgetting? To distill memory in retrospective necessarily means to rely on partial narratives (provided by objects, family members and documents) which gaps and discontinuities allow a space for agency, whilst nonetheless pointing to the irretrievable nature of that which has been forgotten.

Developing around Watkins’ investigation of those memories which compose ‘the lining of forgetting’ [1], the photobook is largely comprised by still lifes of objects that belonged to his mother, Ute, as well as objects and photographs that belonged other family members. Looking at his monumental compositions I found myself reflecting on my relationship to the objects that belonged to those who I loved and lost. Whilst I am lucky enough to still have my mother, I lost my oldest brother when I was nine years old. The memories of him are scarce; the objects I possess of him are even less. The only objects I have access to are an oversized pullover, a faded bracelet made of wooden beads and a camera that my sister recently gave me and which I still did not find the courage to use. The bereavement of his loss was supplemented by the bereavement of his objects; throughout my growth I was accompanied by the feeling that I had been deprived of the instruments I needed to discover my brother and build a posterior intimacy with a man I used to love and who, today, I am unable to tell if I have known or not.

I share this not to relate my experience of loss to Watkins’ experience, but to take a closer look at objects as centrepieces of our emotional and intellectual life. In Watkins’ project objects are pivotal in the process of unforgetting. Yet, none of the totemic assemblages presented to us provide an access to memory; the social biographies of the photographed objects remain unknown to the viewers unless they decide to engage with the many texts written about the project, which shed light on some of their stories. Rather, Watkins’ assemblages recall Lévi-Strauss’ ideas of bricolage - a way of combining and recombining a closed set of materials to develop thought.

“The bricoleur [...] derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he ‘speaks’ not only with things [...] but also through things. The bricoleur may not ever complete his purpose, but he always puts something of himself into it.” [2]

A spread from the book

In Genetic Epistemology, Jean Piaget states that to know an object does not mean copying it, but acting upon it. When we act upon objects, part of our knowledge is derived by the object, whilst the other part is derived by the action itself, which inserts the object into a system of transformation. What Piaget’s and Lévi-Strauss’ theories have in common is that they describe a dynamic relationship between things and thinking, positioning objects as active rather than passive life presences. What is it about objects which so strongly animates us that we, in turn, end up animating the objects? Whilst we might dismiss magical thinking about objects as an experience of childhood, the power objects exert upon us never quite ceases to exercise its influence. The objects that accompany us through our lives essentially outlive us, carrying a vast archive of singular human gestures that endow them with their unique essence. In dealing with things that have been left behind by our dead, it is not much the visual but the tactile which provides a posterior connection to whom we have lost - our hands discovering the surfaces which have been touched before; the gesture repeated in a ritualistic manner stretching through generations; an imaginary contact between our body and the body which we can no longer touch. These gestures, whilst invisible in Watkins’ photographs, are implicitly contained within the images, contaminating visuality with touch. It is through these haptic and visual experiences that Watkins seems to reinforce his familial bonds, lending to the project a performative quality in which the relationship between action and object activates the process of unforgetting. Watkins’ compositions are not merely an aesthetic practice, but a passionate practice imbued with a high emotional intensity.  

In suggesting that we deal with the loss of objects and subjects in similar ways, the psychodynamic tradition underlines the complex similarities that unite how we relate to the animate and to the inanimate, offering a language to interpret our connection to the world of things. Whether dealing with subjects or objects, we confront the other and shape the self [3]. What The Unforgetting teaches us is that it is not much the loss of specific, real-life memories which constitutes the abyss of forgetting, but the loss of one’s own subject position in relation to events which are only partially remembered - or partially forgotten. Whether these subject positions are built on empirical facts or imaginary (re)connections, perhaps, is totally irrelevant. What matters in the memorialization of the dead is the opportunity do renew and revive our affective bonds, which we actualise (also) through object intimacies. That, then, would be unforgetting. 

“The Unforgetting” by Peter Watkins is the winner of the SKINNERBOOX BOOK AWARD 2019

[1] Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1983), cited by Peter Watkins, The Unforgetting (2016), interview with Pauline Rowe
[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962)
[3] Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects (2007)

SINGLE IMAGE #2 - FONTANESI

from the book FONTANESI - GRANDISSIMA SELEZIONE

Footsteps echo in the piazza. When we turn to greet the lonely wanderer we are received by two elegantly dressed feet. They do not belong to one character; rather than walking in unison, they are hopping - two singular, elegantly dressed feet taking their trunk for a walk. Behind their waving branches, the familiar landscape of the Italian province - probably a municipal building - embellished with the Italian and the European flag. I would like to ask them where they are going, but it is renown that trees do not have ears to listen or mouths to reply with.

 Simone Sbarbati described Fontanesi’s instagram account as the sketchbook of a character designer, “and where there is a character, it is safe to assume that what we have in our hands is an ingredient for a potential story”[1]. And if picking one single image out of his “encyclopedia of creatures” has been an ordeal, to describe it without employing a novelistic approach would have been impossible, for Fontanesi’s creatures insistently probe our imagination and beg us to weave them a story, animate their movements, fantasies about their past and future, listen to the sound of their footsteps.

Cut and restored, Fontanesi’s creatures are fruit of a simple yet effective mounting technique which splits the image in half and recomposes it by enlarging, reflecting, shifting and matching bodies: natural and artificial, these new transformers blur the separation between subject-object, turning objects into “things that feels”, subjects into practical tools, men and women into genetically modified (or better, digitally mounted) monsters. Which bodies - both real and abstract - are being cut to produce this atlas of “modern provincial folklore”? And what is created by these recombinations?

 Let’s start by considering the setting for Fontanesi’s characters: the Italian province. In the essay Cut! Reproduction and Recombination, Hito Steyerl reflects upon the term ‘cut’ as used both in cinematography and in economics, the former referring to the mounting of sequences, the latter to the reduction of “government spending on welfare, culture, pensions and other social services”[2]. Gripped by a public debt which has been steadily increasing for over ten years, the Italian government has issued severe cuts in a variety of social services (first and foremost education and pensions), and currently faces an unemployment rate of 10,2% - the third highest unemployment rate in Europe after Spain and Greece. In the midst of debt, economic depression and migration crisis, Italy is subject to “a hyperinflation of metaphors of pure national-social and racial bodies”[3], the pervasive slogan of the current Minister of Interiors being “Italians First”. And as cuts are being enforced on the metaphoric economic body of the State, non-white, racialized bodies are wounded on the street: a twelve years old Egyptian boy hospitalized after being beaten up for the third time in February 2019, a Gypsy mother with her daughter verbally assaulted by a representative of Casa Pound, black men ran over and beaten under the accusation of being black.

 The socio-political landscape I described feels far from the humorous, magically twisted province created by Fontanesi. Yet, these pixelated creatures which mash-up genders, objects and limbs allow us to imagine a social body that deviates from existing configurations of class, race and gender. Reflecting upon Siegfried Kracauer’s ideas on the potential of recombinations of bodies expressed in The Mass Ornament, which took the Tiller Girls as a starting point to argue for a radicalization of fragmentation, Steyerl suggests:

“The industrial body of the Tiller Girls is abstract, artificial, alienated. Precisely because of this, it breaks with the traditional and, at that time, racially imbued ideologies of origin, belongin, as well as with the idea of a natural, collective body created by genetics, race, or common culture. [...] Kracauer saw the anticipation of another body, which would be freed from the burden of race, genealogy and origin - and we can add, free of memory, guilt and debt - precisely by being artificial and composite”[4]

 Described by Stefano Riba as “post-truth, post-identity, post-human”, the hopping trees which traverse the province are genderless and raceless. In Fontanesi’s world, all bodies are legitimate; mono-legged horses, macrocephalous men, two-headed women. The story I wish to tell through Fontanesi’s characters is one of striking inequalities, but also one of possibilities; an imaginative exercise through which we can reconsider our ideas on subjecthood and identity. Perhaps, we should stop expecting photography to deliver us a ‘truthful’ representation of an essential identity bound to race, class and gender (if that even exists), and start questioning by what means could it provide a pool for our creative minds to dive into and reimagine a radically reformed social body. 

 The legged trees hopped away into the lazy Sunday of the Italian province, nobody questioned where they came from or whether they had the right to be there, and they went about their day enjoying the sunshine.

 The first book by fontanesi, “GRANDISSIMA SELEZIONE” is available here

Benedetta Casagrande
Photographer, writer, curator

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[1] Sbarbati, Simone, Grandissima Selezione: arriva il primo libro di fontanesi, frizzifrizzi.it

[2] Steyerl, Hito, Cut! Reproduction and Recombination, The Wretched of the Screen, eFlux, pp. 177

[3] Ibid.

[4] Steyerl, Hito, Cut! Reproduction and Recombination, The Wretched of the Screen, eFlux, pp.181

HEREAFTER by Federico Clavarino - THE MAKING OF

— Objects

Hereafter tracks the last years of the British empire through an investigation of the life of the photographer’s grandparents and their progeny. Carefully sewing together the history of his family and the history of British colonialism, the shaping of Hereafter began in 2013 in response to the photographer’s need to reconnect with his British grandparents; his grandmother, Mary Phillips, and his grandfather, John Phillips, who passed away in 1998 when the photographer was very young. Visiting his grandparents house in Horsham in 2013, he notes:

 “I remember this feeling of going through drawers, albums and things and feeling that I had the opportunity to address my grandparents life through them. It was the objects that spoke first. I remember all these things sitting in the dark or in the bottom of drawers, and being like unanswered questions. So you could be fascinated  by the way they were strange and in the same time be curious about what they meant, where they came from and what was the web that brought together these objects in that place. And the key to that was what my grandmother was capable of remembering.” 

The unspoken histories of familial objects led Clavarino to initiate dialogues with his grandmother, which in turn unlocked the histories of the family. During that first visit Clavarino began to quickly photograph the objects with his father’s digital camera. In his second visit, he returned to the house with a medium format Mamiya - but it still didn’t feel quite right. Ultimately, Clavarino decided to invest on a large format technical camera, which gave him the possibility to approach the house, the objects and the portraits in a slower manner; “a process in which you stage and stare at the objects”. Clavarino remarks;

from HEREAFTER @Federico Clavarino

“At the beginning of the project I didn’t really know where it would take me. I had identified the fact that there were these two things; the first had to do with my family, my grandmother, the fear that she would die, and with this encounter with my grandfather [through the objects and ephemera found in the house]. The second was this whole thing about empire and this idea of something in history that has been disavowed and the way it could live within a family archive”.

 This binary structure - doubtlessly difficult to concile - identified during the initial stage began to define the shape of the project, moving beyond an initial, visceral reaction to the space and the objects.

 “I learnt to know the house and the light that would change according to the time of day and the year… It was fascinating because different corners of the house became visible; suddenly it was summer and the light would come in through a different window at a different time of day and the corners that were previously unlit became lit, and could become the backdrop of photographs.”

from HEREAFTER @Federico Clavarino

Rather than displacing the objects and photographing them in a cold, documentary manner placed against a white anonymous background, Clavarino photographed them “as they were and slowly became visible”, taking pictures of them as they were progressively discovered. Whilst many objects were photographed, plenty of other materials such as newspaper clippings, archival photographs and documents were instead scanned, and have a different function within the photobook.

— Conversations

 Hereafter is significantly imbued with the conversations which occurred between Clavarino and his family members - not only his grandmother, but also her children. The conversations took on different shapes and formats depending on who was the interlocutor.

“Most of the conversations with my grandmother were very natural and I would just sometimes turn on the recorder when I felt something important was being said. She was very happy to have the opportunity to tell stories and eager to share them and remember things of happier moments of her life, because I think she felt nobody really cared. Obviously after a while it became a bit repetitive. She would focus on a set amount of anecdotes, and you would notice how these anecdotes were selected and remembered, and that had to do with what was probably more ‘comfortable’ to remember. I think those anecdotes also supported, or had supported, her world view. It was interesting to see what she forgot and what she remembered - and you also had a very partial access to what she forgot or decided not to tell from what other people would tell or what you found in documents. [...] This is something very important about the project: all the empty spaces and the way in which narrative and history are not only based on remembering but are also built on what is forgotten.”

from HEREAFTER @Federico Clavarino

In regards to the other members of his family, the more the project proceeded the more the conversations became structured. With an increased understanding of what he was looking for, Clavarino would arrange meetings and go to their houses with a prepared set of questions.

—Travels

 After receiving a grant from Fotopres La Caixa, Clavarino suddenly found himself able to travel to the sites where his grandparents lived during the years in which John worked as British ambassador. Because the funds were not enough to travel to all the countries the family lived in, he decided to focus on the countries in which they spent the longest time: Oman, Jordan and Sudan.

Federico at work for HEREAFTER

from HEREAFTER @Federico Clavarino

“The opportunity to travel meant I could see something more for myself. I felt that was exactly what could help me make the material I had more complex and not fall into a kind of very straightforward portrayal of colonial nostalgia. That was something I always very consciously wanted to avoid. So I thought that by bringing in this other material and making it work together with what I already had - which was basically other people’s voices - I could bring in the way in which I was there and how that was partly determined by the way my family had been there before me, by what I had been told and what I saw. I didn’t have the ambition to ‘say everything’, as it would have been impossible. It was more about laying out a series of tensions and contradictions. So that was the thin and very delicate line I was trying to travel on, but it was tricky, as in the end the way I was working was a semi-controlled drift. I had a series of points and places which had to do with stories, but everything in the middle of empty and open to chance. This made everything more permeable and vulnerable, because I wasn’t working on a preselection of choices. It allowed me to be there, exposed, and absorb everything like a sponge.”

— Editing

 After coming back from the various journeys Clavarino found himself with hundreds and hundreds of images to work through and make sense of: the photographs taken in his grandparents house, the scanned archival material and ephemera, the transcripts of conversations and the images of the travels.

 “All of that went through an initial selection and printed small, including a selection of parts of the transcripts which I screenshot and printed out. Because the material was so much I had to rent a studio for a few months. I needed a very big space to map it out, or at least map out part of it, because the togetherness of all the material didn’t fit also when I entered the studio. It took me three months to take it down to something I could take away and work with at home. But the whole process was probably a year long - you also need a lot of time in between to digest what is there and understand how to structure the material.”

The decision to divide the book into five chapters, and that every chapter would correspond to a specific place, was taken in order to facilitate the massive editing operation Clavarino was faced with. The first chapter brings together the material from the domestic space of his grandparents and introduces the story through his ancestors, “the phantom of empire and the way it lurked in all the dark corners of the house”. The second, third and fourth chapters focus respectively on Oman, Jordan and Sudan, each exploring a different aspect of the same problem; the British empire. In the case of Oman, the photographs taken during his travels were associated to the story told by his uncle William on the birth of the country, the exploitation of resources and the sale of infrastructures which lead to the coup and the removal of the old Sultan. The chapter on Jordan, which was also born through geopolitical engineering on behalf of Britain and France, focuses on the formal relationships between diplomats, “made of an iconology of hand-shakes, letters passed on, smiles, and this idea of communication, or interference with communications, and empty words and formalities”. The penultimate chapter highlights the way his grandparents perceived their role and their presence in Sudan, and the ways in which their views and interpretations of their surrounding were part of the process which shaped stereotyped ideas about native tribemen. The last chapter, The Quantum Soul, brings the project to an end through a reflection on death, the afterlife, and the cyclicity of history in which Clavarino also re-inserts himself into the picture. Reflecting on his editing process, he comments:

HEREAFTER exhibited at Caixa Forum

“What I didn’t want to do is to have some kind of preconceived idea of what things mean, or should mean, and find examples - that would have been boring and dishonest. I find more interesting to build the thought whilst I work, to allow the images I find to echo the words I have heard… and that enters a system that is being built whilst I work. It’s lived experience. And then you have moments in which all that lived experience is meditated upon and structured and made understandable, but the idea is that you don’t want to just take all of that and explain what it means to you… you need to get it over to someone else with the same degree of complexity and in the same time provide some kind of key for people to work with. You want the reader to work, because that’s when the reader can provide extra content and interpret, re-live it and add to it. And that becomes a way to share the work instead of imposing it.”

— Book Production

 Clavarino’s describes himself as “obsessed with color and the materiality of the print”, and his production of color photographs entails a painstaken, laborious process. For the production of Hereafter, he printed a selection of photographs in the color darkroom at Lab35 in Madrid with the support of his long-term colleague Jose Luis Perez, producing over 180 C-type analogue prints. To have full control over color balance and subtle hues and tones, the prints were then scanned on a flatbed scanner alongside the archival material. The final color-balance of the images is thus the result of a mixture of digital and analogue processes of color correction, undertaken in order to make the material coherent.

Last Dummy of HEREAFTER

“If you notice, every chapter has a particular color palette. I believe in these things in the sense that it’s like… the voice, or the music of the work - it has a power, it has a tone. So every chapter has its own, and I worked on that very consciously both when I was editing  and then printing the work and then re-working the color digitally. Then all that was made into a dummy book.”

For the draft of the book Clavarino worked with Tres Tipos Gràficos, a group of Madrid-based graphic designers, which he had already worked with for the making of Italia o Italia and The Castle.

 “What usually happens is that I make the sequence, a rough design, and then they fix it. But for Hereafter it was a lot more complex. I didn’t know how to use InDesign (now I have learnt a little bit), so I created every single page on Photoshop, and gave it to them saying: this is how the book works. Esther Madrazo, my assistant at that time, who is a brilliant designer, did a lot of the actual balancing of every page. We had grids created by the designers and she would place the images and the text within the grids so that everything was balanced and felt good. The cover was tricky too. That was probably the thing on which the designers worked on the most. They came up with it… at the beginning I was very surprised, seeing my name that big, I didn’t like it. Usually it’s never there on the covers of my books, so I was rather reluctant. But they convinced me of the way it worked and I like it very much now! It’s like an architecture of the cover, more than only text.”

Federico checking colors during the production of the book

For the first draft of the book, Clavarino produced five maquettes which were moved around and the book was one of the finalists of the LUMA Dummy Book Award at Arles Photo Festival, which allowed him to receive some early feedback. In the first dummy, almost 400 pages long, the found material, his photographs and the text were laid out in small constellations on every spread, shared the same space, and there were notes at the end of each chapter. The rhythm created by the repetitiveness of the layout strategy, as well as the exorbitant amount of materials and notes, made the reading of the book a little too chaotic and demanding.

 “It was a bit too much… it felt like these very white blocks with all these little floating islands. So in the end we decided to give a stronger structure to each page, and I had the idea of dividing the found material and use it to separate each chapter and abolish the notes. So I integrated part of the notes within the chapter, and used the found material as notes, printing them on a different paper, which means you have this first reading of my photography and the text that is played together, and the rest is a bit more analytical, so you have all of this research material at the end of each chapter to make things more complex and have more information. So ideally, if you want you can go through the book a first time without even looking at the found material and already have a sense of what is going on and how it works, and then go deeper into it by also integrating the found material and getting more from the letters, the text, the people in the images, matching them with the voices, and so on. On one hand it made it a bit more easier for the reader, and on the other it meant that actually if you wanted you could get even more out of it.”

 With the second edit of the book they managed to bring the page number down to 300 or less, allowing for the price of acquisition and shipping to drop, making the book accessible for a wider audience.

 “Nonetheless, the book had to be large, because you had to be able to read the text in the images and in the letters and so on… so you needed room to make that work. And in the first dummy, all the found material was reproduced in scale! I had to give up that rule in the second version because in the end it was a bit arbitrary and tyrannical. So what I did was to try and maintain the proportions but shrink everything a little bit to make it fit.”

 Once the second draft was ready, the printing process with Skinnerboox began.

First sheet of HEREAFTER

“I am a bit obsessive, so I need digital color proofing, then I need offset color proofing, then I need to go to the printer and supervise every single page because I want everything to be good. I think for many photographers the process of printing a book can be a little disappointing, as you are used to high quality printing, especially when printing in the darkroom. And then when you go to offset it’s always so different, so it can be frustrating. But it went well, the printer was good, and over the years I learnt how to respect and understand the work of the technicians and learn what they can and what they can’t do. Skinnerboox has been profoundly supportive and enthusiastic throughout the project, and took a great risk with my book: it’s big, it’s expensive to make, it’s a gamble, it’s a book with a lot of text in a market in which people are not very keen on reading text, and it’s a tricky subject. So as a publisher that is probably risky, but Milo has always gone with it, and allowed me to make the book I wanted to make. It’s been a very good collaboration.” 

Federico Clavarino in conversation with Benedetta Casagrande

March 2019

HEREAFTER is available in trade and limited edition here

SINGLE IMAGE #1 - Wolfgang

As part of our new section Newsblog we have decided to start experimenting with single image texts, picking a different image from one of our photobooks every month. Working towards photographic projects (and their display within photobooks) we spend a long time concerning ourselves with sequencing and narrative. Once the photobook is ready, the sequence ordinately laid inside the book, the narrative functioning correctly, what happens when we focus on the analysis of what and how does one single image communicate? What could this tell us on the functioning of photographic images? Our first pick is a diptych from the recently published second edition of David Fathi’s Wolfgang, which through a recontextualisation of images taken from CERN’s archive tells the strange tale of the Pauli Effect; the myth that Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, caused unexplainable failures of equipment and experiments just through his mere presence.

 We hope you will enjoy the reading! 

A man in a white lab coat is peering through a small magnifying lens propped up against a wide opaque screen which recalls the back of a large format camera, his right hand manipulating a button which I suppose aids the act of looking by somehow enhancing the observed matter - to us invisible - on the screen. In the adjacent photograph, the screen of the machine has been lifted and reveals its internal structure without disclosing to the curious viewer the object of observation. The man is gone; all that remains of him are his black leather shoes, emptied in the same position in which we found the man standing in the previous picture.

 Sourced from the photographic archives of the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN, today more often referred to as the European Laboratory of Particle Physics), we do not know whether this diptych has undergone manipulation on behalf of David Fathi. Shot with the use of flash and recording the scene from the exact same point of view, we also do not know whether the pictures were taken with human intervention or if they are the repetitive work of a camera specifically set-up to continuously record what was going on in the room. French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer E.J.Marey (1830-1904) dreamed about the significance of photographic images in science as the “language of the phenomena itself”. The history of scientific objectivity and its relationship with photographs is crucially imbued with notions of morality in science; whilst the human observer of phenomena was subject to tiredness, fallible attention spans and, fundamentally, subjective interpretation, the mechanical nature of photographic technology was considered to impose objectivity because of the detail and infallibility of the apparatus itself. As pointed out by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in Images of Objectivity, “it was not simply that these devices saved the labor of human observers; they surpassed human observers in the laboring virtues: they produced not just more observations, but better observations.”

To contemporary readers, it is immediately clear that what was left out of this moralized equation at the end of the 19th century is the interpretation on behalf of who looks at the image. Whilst scientists at the time were concerned with the subjective interpretation of who is looking at the phenomena, they seemed to be unaware of the of the subjectivity involved in reading photographs. The dream of a realm where images are impervious to subjective interpretation is brutally shattered as soon as the pictures are confronted with a new observer.

 Yet, it would be a mistake to believe that the contemporary viewer has been “freed” from the ideal of the objective image, particularly when confronting a scientific archive such as CERN’s. Photographs are still used as evidence, both juridically and in everyday life, testifying the truth of events. For our notion of objectivity is also intrinsically tied to notions of “truth” and “authenticity”, and still has a back-taste of moralized ethics. What are we to make, then, of Fathi’s disappeared scientist in the diptych selected from Wolfgang? We are suspended between a fictional and factual narrative, we do not know whether he has intervened upon the photographs or if they are as he has found them in CERN’s archive. Their aesthetic quality - the flash, the central, fixed perspective - are persuasive in that they hold that ‘amateurial’, not-aestheticized quality which we so often associate with ‘authentic’ photographic material.

 Fathi’s photobook ends with an eloquent quote by Richard Feynman: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics”. In a field constellated by awe-striking and incomprehensible phenomenons such as entanglement, wave-particle duality and the double-slit experiment, physicists (and us, when we catch a glimpse of this fabulous field through their simplified explanations) constantly stare into an abyss in which the functionings of time, space and particles seems to be beyond human reach. Scientific American editor Clara Moskowitz stated: “perhaps our only flaw is in trying to use ordinary common sense to grok what is fundamentally an otherworldly universe that does not lend itself to our frail minds.” Perhaps, then, the playful and sometimes eerie photographs arranged in Wolfgang convey a truth which goes way beyond our notions of objectivity; the man in the diptych could have as well disappeared into infinite particles, and the intricate, meddled, incomprehensible but nonetheless real universe of quantum mechanics persists in lying beyond human understanding. What this suggests in regards to our notion of ‘truth’ and its relationship to photographic imagery, then, is that the relationship they bare might be more complex than what we might assume. If truth is narrated through an unreal story, does it make it any less true? Or could the truth perhaps be conveyed with increased accuracy if we rely on alternative narrative devices, rather than placing all our hopes on ‘true events’?

 The answer to these questions we leave open to the reader.

 Benedetta Casagrande
Photographer, writer, curator

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