Forgotten People
Introduction/background
I am equally fascinated & haunted by memories of the past. Browsing through family albums & studying photographs opens up a gateway into what seems a much more agreeable place than the present. I guess, this has to do with the fact that one remembers the wound but not the pain. Our human memory tends to create or retain mainly the good & positive parts of the past in order for us to stay sane. I am not entirely sure.
Memories are wonderful things that consist of events that happened in the past & a dose of imagination that fill in the gaps. They help us remember where it all started & who we are. I am not so much interested in the scientific & anatomical side of the brain and the faculty of remembering but rather in the links & differences between the past and the present as well as the ripples of time.
Looking at myself, I feel there is a deep social as well as an emotional connection with events, people and the zeitgeist of approximately the last hundred years and not so much with the time before. I feel I am connected up to the time of my grandparents when they were young families. Their concerns, their way of thinking, their cultural interests have somehow prevailed to a certain degree. I grew up reading the works by Erich Kästner, Hermann Hesse and Robert Walser, all authors of a time before I was even born. Their work was part of my grandparents' and my parents' time and has infiltrated & formed my own time and myself.
In a world where events, people, landscapes, everything is constantly being captured by photographic devices, we seem to have changed our relationship with memory and the way we value the representation of specific moments, objects, events, people etc. Everything is being constantly and continuously documented. I feel that we 'consume' the world and impressions with mindless & blind greed. As I long for a more sober and more thoughtful life, I tend to spend a lot of time hanging around in junk shops (retro shops) poking around in the past of others. A while ago in one of these shops in the sea town of Margate in South-East England, I came across a couple of dusty boxes that contained hundreds of old fashioned photographic slides. This took me back to my grandparents. I remembered the sound and even the smell of the old projector. It was wonderful. When I browsed through the slides, I was most fascinated by the photographs that captured people, people at important events and stages of their lives such as weddings or family reunions, people in front of their newly acquired car etc. The way people posed and the way the photographs were framed seems quite different from nowadays, I feel. As I didn't want to buy all the slides, I selected only the slides of the described portraits of people to take home. I was very touched and also sad by my findings as these people were, are REAL people. Someone didn't know what to do with all the slides and decided to give them away, sell them to a junk shop.
The work
Back home in the studio I decided to re-create a slide show in digital and not in its original form as I want to connect them with the present. I photographed every slide and fed them into my computer. In order to link my own personal life to the lives of the people depicted in the photographs, I re-created and adapted my own memories to each individual image. I then narrated the story that emerged on top of the slide show. I also decided to add the sound of a slide projector in order to create the illusion of an old-style slideshow. Last but not least I added another level layer of sound I made in my departed father's Blue Room.
The work doesn't necessarily unveil hidden realities or has as its objective an intellectually interesting (apart from the question of ownership of art) or stimulative outcome or investigation. I rather want to give the people a second chance to live on. Whenever I take a photograph, I do this because I want a specific moment to last and share with others. To me these people are the forgotten people, forgotten and for sale in a junk shop.
Apart from the photographs as a digital slideshow as described above, it is also possible to print the photographs (up to 100cm x 66cm each).
Note:
During the editing process of the photographs, I felt that my connection with the people in the pictures grew stronger and stronger. I felt that I became part of their lives, that there was and still is a sort of mutual relationship although it is clear to me that these people don't know anything about me, don't even know that I exist. This journey into the past of others connects me to my own past, to where I began, came into existence. There is a bond as we are the children of the same cultural zeitgeist. My work on Forgotten People coincides with the Grenfell Tower fire in London in which more than 80 people tragically lost their lives and a lot of people lost all their belongings. How will they be remembered? The faceless people in the ashes of the tower block?
I have done other work that somewhat relates to this work, namely Gaischterhuus, the Blue Room & By-product of a thousand lives. All three pieces of work deal with my own past and my own struggle to get over a lost part of myself.
I am equally fascinated & haunted by memories of the past. Browsing through family albums & studying photographs opens up a gateway into what seems a much more agreeable place than the present. I guess, this has to do with the fact that one remembers the wound but not the pain. Our human memory tends to create or retain mainly the good & positive parts of the past in order for us to stay sane. I am not entirely sure.
Memories are wonderful things that consist of events that happened in the past & a dose of imagination that fill in the gaps. They help us remember where it all started & who we are. I am not so much interested in the scientific & anatomical side of the brain and the faculty of remembering but rather in the links & differences between the past and the present as well as the ripples of time.
Looking at myself, I feel there is a deep social as well as an emotional connection with events, people and the zeitgeist of approximately the last hundred years and not so much with the time before. I feel I am connected up to the time of my grandparents when they were young families. Their concerns, their way of thinking, their cultural interests have somehow prevailed to a certain degree. I grew up reading the works by Erich Kästner, Hermann Hesse and Robert Walser, all authors of a time before I was even born. Their work was part of my grandparents' and my parents' time and has infiltrated & formed my own time and myself.
In a world where events, people, landscapes, everything is constantly being captured by photographic devices, we seem to have changed our relationship with memory and the way we value the representation of specific moments, objects, events, people etc. Everything is being constantly and continuously documented. I feel that we 'consume' the world and impressions with mindless & blind greed. As I long for a more sober and more thoughtful life, I tend to spend a lot of time hanging around in junk shops (retro shops) poking around in the past of others. A while ago in one of these shops in the sea town of Margate in South-East England, I came across a couple of dusty boxes that contained hundreds of old fashioned photographic slides. This took me back to my grandparents. I remembered the sound and even the smell of the old projector. It was wonderful. When I browsed through the slides, I was most fascinated by the photographs that captured people, people at important events and stages of their lives such as weddings or family reunions, people in front of their newly acquired car etc. The way people posed and the way the photographs were framed seems quite different from nowadays, I feel. As I didn't want to buy all the slides, I selected only the slides of the described portraits of people to take home. I was very touched and also sad by my findings as these people were, are REAL people. Someone didn't know what to do with all the slides and decided to give them away, sell them to a junk shop.
The work
Back home in the studio I decided to re-create a slide show in digital and not in its original form as I want to connect them with the present. I photographed every slide and fed them into my computer. In order to link my own personal life to the lives of the people depicted in the photographs, I re-created and adapted my own memories to each individual image. I then narrated the story that emerged on top of the slide show. I also decided to add the sound of a slide projector in order to create the illusion of an old-style slideshow. Last but not least I added another level layer of sound I made in my departed father's Blue Room.
The work doesn't necessarily unveil hidden realities or has as its objective an intellectually interesting (apart from the question of ownership of art) or stimulative outcome or investigation. I rather want to give the people a second chance to live on. Whenever I take a photograph, I do this because I want a specific moment to last and share with others. To me these people are the forgotten people, forgotten and for sale in a junk shop.
Apart from the photographs as a digital slideshow as described above, it is also possible to print the photographs (up to 100cm x 66cm each).
Note:
During the editing process of the photographs, I felt that my connection with the people in the pictures grew stronger and stronger. I felt that I became part of their lives, that there was and still is a sort of mutual relationship although it is clear to me that these people don't know anything about me, don't even know that I exist. This journey into the past of others connects me to my own past, to where I began, came into existence. There is a bond as we are the children of the same cultural zeitgeist. My work on Forgotten People coincides with the Grenfell Tower fire in London in which more than 80 people tragically lost their lives and a lot of people lost all their belongings. How will they be remembered? The faceless people in the ashes of the tower block?
I have done other work that somewhat relates to this work, namely Gaischterhuus, the Blue Room & By-product of a thousand lives. All three pieces of work deal with my own past and my own struggle to get over a lost part of myself.
- Gaishterhuus: http://jayrechsteiner.com/gaischterhuus.htm
- And now it's my art: http://jayrechsteiner.com/its_my_art_now.htm
- heritage: http://jayrechsteiner.com/heritage.htm
- the Blue Room: http://jayrechsteiner.com/the_blue_room.html
- By-Product of a Thousand Lives: http://jayrechsteiner.com/by-product_of_a_thousand_lives.htm
- A thousand lives: http://jayrechsteiner.com/archive_of_a_thousand_lives.htm