where are they going?

Johann Promberger, 1920

The world has changed. Information is being communicated differently. Misinformation is developing its techniques.

John Berger

Where do pictures come from, what are they doing here, where are they going?

Peter Putz

A man wearing a work apron, sitting at a small table, looking at an open book. The room sparsely furnished. Caption: political prisoner, 1942.

The man in the photograph is Erich Sander, sentenced in 1935 by the National Socialists to 10 years imprisonment for his membership of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany. The photograph was taken by his father, August Sander. On March 24, 1944, shortly before the end of his prison term, Erich Sander died, after being refused medical assistance. The photo – from the portfolio labeled “Political Prisoners” – is part of August Sander’s vast project, People of the Twentieth Century, and was not published until long after the photographer’s death. The thought of a father photographing his own son, of him having to photograph his own son in prison brings tears to my eyes.

In 1983, the year in which my brother Rupert was traveling in Japan, our father died totally unexpectedly. In the days before the Internet and mobile telephones, the only way to try to get in contact with my brother was to send letters via poste restante to various post offices in the cities where he might have been at the time. I photographed my dead father, partly so that my brother, on his return, could have an idea of how our father looked when he died, a last picture. A picture of the dead as a memory of the living? In the 1920’s, my grandfather, Johann Promberger, photographed dead people. A few glass negatives have survived, negatives that date from a time when it was customary in rural areas for deceased members of the family to be laid out for viewing in the home for a few days before burial. A photographer would be brought in to take a last photograph. Glass negatives that were stored away in an attic for decades now bring back (a picture of) the dead.

Why collect photos? Why take pictures, why keep them, arrange them in some kind of order, look at them, rearrange them in a new, different order? Why try to establish connections? Is it to ward off the prospect of oblivion? To resist the threat of death? To rebel against a death that has occurred? Again – photos that were found: photos taken by my father in 1958, when he was in Mosul, Iraq, and glass negatives of photos taken by my grandfather in the years 1905 – 1925.

Photographs are always being brought to my attention, sometimes they are given to me as presents, sometimes I find them. How do I make head or tail of photos when the person who took them is no longer here to tell me things I need to know? How do I go about putting images together? What stories do I tell? What can I do to help ensure that images and the memory of those who produced them survive with a reasonable degree of authenticity?

We live in a constant swirl of images: in social networks, texts, photos and videos come at us in automated surges driven by algorithms. What gets recorded? What new data gets fed – by me/by others – into the image machine? Where are the data farms and the data mines located? How much do images cost? Who buys them? Who makes money off them? Who pays for them? In a sense, I monitor my life and the lives of a few other people. I often photograph friends and acquaintances over long periods of time then put the photos together as time-lapse portraits, if for no other reason, to show the changes that take place.

The Eternal Archives are an attempt at taking stock of life as it slips away from us, it is a gathering of visual bits and pieces of a world that in many parts is disintegrating, fragmented.

As I write these lines, Gaza is being bombed. I see pictures of wounded men, women and children, huddled up together in the rubble of streets and cities that are being destroyed. I look out the window of the room in which I happen to be working at the moment; I look at the wooded valley, the clouds, the sky – a harsh idyll in the Salzkammergut, where I grew up. Some 70 years ago, more than 8,000 people perished in the Ebensee concentration camp (about 5 km from where I am sitting). On the property next door, a coat of cement is being put on the new swimming pool.