DISPLACED MEMORIES

A Disquieting Blur.

In the visits made to concentration camps I always had a feeling of captured just in time and not completely vanished yet.
So I tried to place the pictures in that "interim space".
Although blurredness is commonly viewed as an error, I have chosen it as the stylistic tool for these pictures.
I am reducing the subject to the essence.
A wall is no longer merely a wall: it is also that which it conceals, locks in, fends off or prevents.
I am thus consciously rejecting the classic reproductive character of photography without restraining its nature of always
being part of the situation it depicts.
The viewer must content themself with this withdrawal of reality, they must substitute it with recollection.
The blur is a sign of the vanishing to come.
A blurred picture gives the eye no peace. It searches the picture for evidence that supplies information about the inconceivable.
The blur provokes fantasy to perfect the incomplete, it provokes memories.
My pictures provoke the phenomenon of remembering.
As the viewer is not being monopolized by the reality of that which is depicted, what is revealed to them is that which is not depicted.
The picture fills itself with added dimensions, and perceptions of other senses can be coupled to them.
As no picture corresponds to a memory, to the experience on which the memory seeks to dock, the blur is the closest thing to it.
It is a balance between visibility and invisibility, an expression of discontent and the desire to see differently than usual.
The visit to these places always triggers a feeling of sadness in me,
the feeling of having lost something, having forgotten it or to have let it slip by.
A disquieting blur arose.

Till Leeser

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