update april 2004 (gallery 13)
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Photographs are as much expressions of experience as reminders of times and places, people and events. They testify to the presence of the author and attest to the circumstances of the past. My photographs reflect an interest in documenting the conditions of existence in late twentieth century and beyond in the social or political niche of everyday life. They are cultural products, or fictional accounts intended to return the gaze, in a Lacanian fashion, to make the reader conscious of being a subject of history, as the photograph overcomes the distance between past and presence. Photographs relate the experience of looking and record the passing of time. The photographs in these galleries are signs of a photographic record that includes a number of on-going, long-term projects related to places and events that belong to my own biography. These projects focus on the imagery of the common, the traditional, or the trivial, and chronicle the small steps of history. They are interpretations of surface-level experiences from nowhere and everywhere and as such contributions to a collective memory of an ordinary life. Hanno Hardt |