“50 Jahre einer Frau (Portrait. 50 Years of a Woman, 1994), which assembles, in chronological order, three-hundred photographs ofan unnamed woman from childhood through to the age of 50. Feldmann lays a stranger’s life before our eyes and invites us to witness it. He shows the fragmented passage of time, its leaps and bounds from place to place and from event to event. The photographs fulfil our expectations (she gets married) and disappoint them (she has no children). They invite us to study hairstyles, fashions and interiors; they incite us to compare the poses characteristic of different periods of life, and to recognise the holiday destinations of this generation of central Europeans. Using Harald Weinrich’s words, in Porträt Feldmann ‘sees in the faces of other people he encounters daily the work of “time the artist”, slowly but also perceptibly making ad justments to their features’. Through their sheer quantity, the three-hundred portraits do achieve one thing: they provide a more effective portrait than any individual image could have done on its own.
Throughout his 40 years as a collector, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s engagement with the photographic image and the way it represents our age suggests that he, to use André Malraux’s phrase, is effectively ‘writing’ a ‘history of what can be photographed’. The many books he has produced assemble a ‘social iconography’ extending from private visual mementos to press photographs to the title pages of Der Spiegel magazine. Malraux, Aby Warburg and Pierre Bourdieu introduced the notion of the ‘imaginary museum’, the ‘social uses of photography’ and the idea of a Mnemosyne Atlas: these could be proposed as the larger concepts behind Feldmann’s obsessive collecting of photographs. Those three authors experimented with arrangements and combinations of photographs, accentuating the comparison between different genres. They worked with reproductions rather than original images, discussed the role of photography and above all proposed the transformation of the traditional museum and its well-preserved, decontextualised artefacts into a conceptual, iconographic institute, on the understanding that, as Rosalind Krauss has said, ‘the photograph archive is a source of knowledge which no museum could ever equal’. Following on from these ideas, Feldmann seeks to grasp all applications and themes of photography, including souvenirs, science, war, reportage, fashion, advertising, entertainment and art, as well as the unusual, the normal, the comic, the tragic, the dramatic, the beautiful and the ugly.”
— Ruth Horak “Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Pictures” in Afterall Journal, #17, Spring 2008. Images from Porträt and 100 Jahre (100 Years, 2001) by Hans-Peter Feldmann.
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