Landscapes Behind (to the memory of Mrs. D. P.)

Landscapes concealed behind other landscapes. Landscapes contained by a frame on the wall or by the sides of a piece of furniture. These landscapes, formed by time and decay, remain unseen until one day a house move, a death, a change in the unbroken routine of everyday life reveals them. As Roland Barthes pointed out, photography is closely related to death.

Ephemeral yet permanent, they are the ultimate traces of a human life. The trace and the object that created it are interdependent; the existence of the former entails the presence of the latter-just as the photograph cannot exist without the negative. Yet they annul each other since one must always remain hidden under the other.

Photography often deals with the past; the “simple mystery of simultaneity”, the coexistence of the past and the real (the present) in every photographic image is – again according to Barthes- what nourishes our spirit.