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History and Recall
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For the writing of history, time runs in a straight line along which the events are located. But memory is vertical. History occupies itself with the event without ever being a part of it.
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History and Archaeology
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After Baudelaire comes Proust, with his conception of time lost and time regained. For Proust, the conception of time in fact quite clearly corresponds to the conception of memory, in contrast to photography, which is the hint of death and of disappearance.
Every photograph is a current document. It is the memory and shelter of time. Because of this characteristic of being a record, there is a relationship between photography/cinema and history, which does not exist anywhere else. Photography appertains to a dimension of historicity of which the other arts are not capable.
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Beat Reichlin, Landscape 2004–2011
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The Swiss photographer Beat Reichlin is exhibiting his series of works Landscape. In the Landscape series, Beat Reichlin (born 1952, living in Basel) deals with the representation of nature, a subject, which has always been of great importance in literature and the fine arts. Behind the confusion of the plants and the impenetrability of the lines crossing over each other, a space becomes discernible. Through the clear decision on the composition, over every picture there is a consideration of the circumstances: where am I? The reflection breaks open the idyll, and in the end embraces vision itself.
The people are in a different place
They are solitary, their backs turned towards us. They are silent. Sometimes they run away from us: forlorn. Turned away, occasionally the theme varies: rear views. A man’s back, sitting, a young girl in plaits her face averted.
Just five people are standing around. Nothing is known about these people, alone with themselves, in front of the vast town: the images are of New York, discreetly observed moments of a city which never becomes the backdrop but is a giant space within which lonely people move around.
As nothing is defined everything is in formation. One view, from behind, invites our eyes to follow this view every time. My view becomes that of this woman.
The people are portrayed in a perceptively observant way. The documented photographs show the milieus not as a stigma but in dignity and they return to them their individual – often proudly raised – face.
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