“You are left in the end with like looking through an old album.
And anyone who had this experience of looking at photographs
doesn’t remember much of what preceded the taking of a
snapshot or what followed the taking of a snapshot.
You’re left just with a snapshot.”

Tim O’Brien during an interview in 2003


The attempt to rely on our memory in order to reconstruct a past experience in all its exactness will ultimately challenge the experience as well as the way it is remembered. How much do we remember and which aspect can be considered ‘truthful’? And even if we manage to recall a moment from our past and describe it in every detail, what determines how ‘truthful’ it is? Although this question points to memory as unreliable factor in the process of conceptualizing things from the past, photographs seemingly offer the factual evidence that memories lack.

The series All that Remains is mainly based on photographs which have been provided by families of fallen American soldiers and can be found on the website www.iraqwarheroes.com.
When I started working on this series in 2006, I looked through hundreds of photographs before I realized how I could possibly approach this extremely charged topic through the medium of painting. After some time, I decided to focus on an array of photographic samples that depicted memorial rituals, commemorative objects and individual soldiers.




Throughout the process of putting this series together, I became increasingly aware of photography’s use as memorial device. On the one hand, as in case of the individual portraits, the depicted people seem to be preserved in a state of simultaneous unavailability and proximity. These "amateur snapshots" provide an illusion of proximity, even though we have never met the subject. But whatever might be implied by the vague notion of ‘amateur’ with regard to the photographs used in this series, in the end this term has little to do with degrees of artistic quality. Instead, the defining characteristic of these snapshots is their presentness and their ability to emphasize the actuality of a particular moment in time. Temporally, these photographic images appear well-defined and non-fleeting, visually fixed within the borders of the photographic frame. Consequently, they deny the viewer any information about what led to their making or what might have followed.

On the other hand, the objects shown in a commemorative context, including the medal, the Dairy Queen ad and the Marine in front of a coffin, function as proof of each soldier’s irreversible absence. This binary of presence and absence found in both pictorial categories – portraits and objects – emphasizes their status as incomplete and fragmentary images incapable of approximating any of the actual soldiers or their experience of war.

As photographs, each of the images renders reality as incomplete, factual occurrence. According to this idea of photographic reality, a set of factors (such as a particular person, object or location) allows for an unambiguous reading of what is represented. If, to the contrary, painting simulates a semblance to a photograph, it detaches the photograph from its initial referent. What this means is that the photograph is no longer pointing to a referent rooted in a factual reality. Instead, the photograph turns into painting’s referent. And by doing so, painting reveals photography as what it is: a producer of images and not of reality.

In the end, All that Remains is a visual approximation of personal histories. As with every history there are multiple narratives with every single one being equally incomplete. But eventually, there lies a truer sense of reality in this incompleteness as our idea of reality stems partly from a set of memories we are incapable of restoring to their initial state.
Ultimately, the series All that Remains is an effort to adapt a common visual practice and its subsequent translation into painting to our practice of remembrance.

August 2008