Phantom

Phantom is a series of black and white photographs taken in Germany during the late eighties and nineties, mainly in my grandmother’s village in the Rhineland. The photos appear to oscillate between the mechanical objectivity of the camera and a subjective distanciation through blurring, or photographic time distortions through the use of a pinhole camera for some of the portraits. Besides those taken in my grandmother’s village there are photos of laden historical sites like the concentration camp of Buchenwald, and Goethe’s house in nearby Weimar, an erstwhile centre of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Germany. The photos were an attempt to touch the subliminal layers of history, barely visible, or highlighted through apparent absences, at once banal and disconcerting.