Stephan Reusse Köln Juli 2026
How Images Become Memories
A Retrospective on My Work from the Early 1980s
When I look back today on my work since the early 1980s, I recognize a connection that I was aware of at the time more intuitively than theoretically. In retrospect, the groups of works—which appear so different on the surface, ranging from chemical image-making processes to blind performances, safari actions, and collaborations, all the way to thermographic works and later light works—ultimately all seem to revolve around the same question: How do images come into being, and how do they become part of our memory?
I was never interested solely in the finished photographic image. Rather, I was preoccupied with the process of its creation—materially, temporally, and later, increasingly, socially as well. For me, the image was never merely a representation of reality, but an event that changes, disappears, reappears, and only gains meaning through perception.
In the early 1980s, I began working with chemists to develop processes in which photographs that had already been developed could first be made invisible again and later made visible once more. I was fascinated by the idea that an image has no definitive state. It could disappear and yet continue to exist—as it were, as a latent memory that only became visible again through a renewed process.
from “the Cultural Memory of Photography”, 1982
These investigations gave rise in 1982 to public performances in which photographs of blind people became visible before the audience’s eyes through a slow chemical process. These performances were accompanied by Tibetan chants. My intention was never to explore spirituality in the narrow sense. Rather, the chants altered the rhythm of perception. They slowed down the gaze and transformed the emergence of an image into a contemplative process.
Originally, I had photographed blind people myself and had them take their own portraits using a self-timer. However, the resulting conversations very quickly led to social and political questions. Although I found these discussions interesting, I was searching for a more fundamental level.
That is why I made a conscious decision to no longer use my own photographs, but rather iconic images of blind people from the history of photography. I was interested in images that had already become part of our collective visual memory. My aim was not to reference famous photographers or pay homage to them. Rather, I was interested in the question of why certain images are remembered for decades, while countless others fade into obscurity.
As these photographs first became invisible and then slowly reemerged from a white surface, the history of photography itself seemed to be unfolding all over again. Cultural memory never struck me as something fixed or complete. It had to be recreated again and again.
Another aspect preoccupied me just as much. The blind people depicted did not return the viewers’ gaze. This created a peculiar sense of unease. As the faces slowly emerged, the reciprocal relationship of seeing was lost. Many visitors later reported that they suddenly found themselves becoming a kind of voyeur. The focus was not on the blindness of the subjects, but on the question of what happens when a gaze is no longer returned. Seeing itself became the subject of the work.
At the same time, as early as the 1980s, I was observing the growing flood of private photographs. The proliferation of inexpensive pocket cameras led to more and more images being produced and archived. However, I was less interested in the production of additional photographs than in the question of what gives individual images their meaning. Why do we remember certain images? How do they become part of our cultural memory?
These questions also shaped my later work. In the “Safari” projects, the creation of the image itself became a public act. The image was not created solely through the act of photography, but through time, materials, and physical labor. The photograph did not document a performance—its creation was the performance.
Performance „Safari III“, Porto 1987
In the “Collaborations” series, my interest eventually shifted to the social dimension of image-making. There, the photographs emerged from conversations, collaborative actions, and symbolic interventions with artists of my generation. Looking back, I see these works not only as portraits but as documents of a space for communication that has largely disappeared today. They preserve not so much individual people as a form of artistic encounter.
Vostell /Reusse aus „Collaborations“, Berlin 1986
It wasn’t until many years later that I encountered Jan Assmann’s ideas on cultural memory. His description of memory as an ongoing cultural process—one that is constantly renewed through images, rituals, and symbolic acts—was surprisingly close to my own understanding. I hadn’t been familiar with this theory at the time, but I recognized in it much of what had preoccupied me since the beginning of my artistic practice.
Today I would say that I was never interested solely in the creation of an image. Rather, I was interested in how images generate memory and how they become part of a cultural memory. Chemical processes, performances, or later collaborations were, for me, different ways of making this process visible.
Perhaps it is precisely this line of inquiry that connects all my works: they do not examine the image as a finished object, but rather the conditions under which images acquire meaning, write history, and ultimately become part of our shared cultural memory.