The photographic printing plates for the book Waljäger (1938) that inspired Horizonte (2018) and associated production materials are also the point of departure for an extended series: Spuren probes questions of heritage, value, and nature as a witness to its time. The series harnesses the means of photography to investigate nature and archetypes of the natural as products of economic and ideological interests.

Geister (2019) is drawing on a subset of the material previously disregarded. Each of the printing stereotypes for the book was kept in storage together with an irregularly shaped piece of sheer tissue paper. Geister brings these papers into focus. The handmade overlay was a tool in letterpress printing; it acted as a stencil that individually calibrated the force exerted on the printing plate by the press, increasing it in areas with planar elements and reducing it for linear drawings.

Geister brings this tool of image manipulation at work in the otherwise unseen printing process to the surface. I used a high-end scanner to successively and systematically scrutinize the source and recorded it as a dataset with the maximum resolution to unfold its depth of detail before the beholder’s eye.

The resulting images cannot be assigned to an ideology, a place, or a time. The functional and visual traces encoded in the stencils turn them into abstract images that raise questions of representation and visibility: What is reality? How does a picture of the world come into being? How are visual representations disseminated, and how do we make sense of them as they recede into the past?

For the edition Geister (2020), I reduced the stencil implements marked by historical traces to their pure outlines and manufactured printing plates based on them. Both the rough forms and the book-printing machine used are references to the conditions of visual production in 1938: a machine of the Original Heidelberger Tiegel type also served to print the photographs in the book Waljäger. The overlays, invisible auxiliary implements used at the time to manipulate the images, are singled out as motifs in their own right and raised to the surface of visibility.

On each sheet, a penciled rectangle the size of the open book and the individual black shape inside it gesture toward the original photographic image that inspired the edition.