clothing is completely strange to me, no cars are left parked in the open, I don’t understand the printed characters. One has to be very careful with such allocations. Perhaps I can say something after seeing another 50,000 images, but I haven’t a clue. In my sketches, the time factor is therefore the connectedness to an originating or development-related time, often the present though. I find that very good. History is always the enrollment of selected things that occur in a particular time. And this enrollment usually happens for two reasons: either to earn money, or it involves power-political interests of some kind. This means history is never enrolled at the level of banality. Nowadays when some people engage in time research, for instance on the 1970s, they reach for «Stern» magazine or watch films of that period, and, based on these productions, they extract whatever can be researched. And they actually believe that, in this way, they acquire a knowledge of how things really were then. But those who consciously experienced that other time can’t believe their eyes – because often nothing about the research feels or sits right. I call this a very questionable route. Assuming

the largest portion of our life on this planet is made up of peaceful and muted banalities, the historical is rather underrepresented. But possibly a portion of that lies in these tons of totally banal, clicked photographs. In 2002, in Germany, circa 5,3 billion paper prints were produced, which is like saying that circa 168 images were made every second, day and night. That was before the market collapsed and far more digital amateur cameras than analog cameras were sold. Today if one estimated the number of photographs taken every second, with every breath, the amount would be rather insane. I am not an art historian or scientist trying to subsume amateur photography, or transport it into a work. But I do tell myself: There must be something here! So many millions of people can’t be wrong! There’s something to it! Of course, on the other hand, you have the disappointment: an image never depicts what happens on the other side of the camera – yet something else must be at work here; if you’re disappointed anew every time, you wouldn’t just try it again and again, would you?!

Daniels: In the future, image production for