Hans-Peter Feldmann (1941–2023) was an artist born in Düsseldorf, Germany. From the late 1960s, he collected press photographs, postcards, and personal pictures, making the small-format Bilder booklets and sequential photographs known as Time Series. He later developed works including 100 Years and Die Toten, as well as installations using everyday objects. Moving among photographs, printed matter, and installations, he made the selection and arrangement of images central to the ways people and history are seen.
While fine-art photography often centered on an individual image made by its photographer, Feldmann treated photographs gathered from newspapers, advertising, and family albums as equally usable material. Repetition by theme and the double-page spread generate meaning in his inexpensive Bilder booklets; in 100 Years, an age-based sequence turns individual portraits into the span of a life. Even where the artist did not take the original picture, his choice of images, their number, and their juxtaposition across a spread determined the form of the work. The same procedure informs Die Toten, which places people killed in political violence—previously separated by newspaper coverage—within a shared format and chronological order. The faces of people associated with the RAF, police officers, and civilians are removed from event-specific headlines and arranged by dates of death from 1967 to 1993.
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Contents · Table of Contents
Postwar Düsseldorf — From the Scarcity of Printed Images to Collecting
Feldmann was born in Düsseldorf in 1941, during World War II. Printed imagery was scarce in his postwar childhood, and available magazine photographs or printed ephemera offered rare glimpses of an unfamiliar world. *11 The rise of an advertising-saturated consumer society subsequently expanded what he could collect. *22 He studied painting in Linz during the 1960s and began self-publishing the small Bild and Bilder booklets around 1968. At this point, he also developed the method of gathering related objects or scenes and grouping them by subject or chronology without explanatory captions. *1 Using photographs he had collected since approximately age twelve, Feldmann turned away from painting in 1968 to concentrate on choosing and arranging existing images. *9 The changing visual culture of West Germany provides a further background to his approach. After wartime and immediate postwar shortages, advertising, magazines, product packaging, and television rapidly entered daily life during the 1950s and 1960s. Feldmann used this expanding supply of printed imagery as raw material, examining consumer culture through acts of selection. *22 By the late 1960s, the small pictures gathered after the war had become the subject-based booklets of Bilder. Old postcards and family photographs carried an interest in lost time, while advertisements and press pictures offered observations of the contemporary consumer economy. Collected alongside everyday objects, the old and the new became layers of things passing through people’s hands and circulating in society. *11
Bilder — Making an Inexpensive Booklet the Work Itself
The early Bilder booklets were slim publications reproducing small groups of familiar subjects: airplanes, shoes, and clouds, but also women’s knees and unmade beds. They appeared as Bild von Feldmann / Bilder von Feldmann between 1972 and 1974. *3 Feldmann called the booklet the simplest and cheapest means of reproduction and recalled sending copies to friends or giving them away. *10 Making inexpensive multiples and passing them to others were part of the work’s form, consonant with developments that established the artist’s book as an independent artistic medium. Unlike a unique work on the wall, a printed booklet invites handling and page turning. *2 Various editions from Bilder through Voyeur remain in collections today, and publishing was a central part of his work for decades. *21 The booklet itself was the artwork: spreads and page order generated associations between adjacent images and repeated themes. By using inexpensive offset printing, Feldmann let his work circulate by mail and through bookshops, away from the singular photographic print. *10 Even the speed at which a reader turned pages shaped the encounter. Michel Baudson situates Bilder, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, among early artist’s books centered on photography. Regrouping existing photographs by subject shifted the work away from the institutional convention of viewing isolated images on a wall and into the progression of pages. *25 Feldmann continued to make books thereafter. A catalog published in 2023 records 157 titles across approximately fifty-five years, including some fifty one-off or handmade volumes. *27 For him, the book remained a principal medium in which collection and repetition could determine the order of looking.
Bilder and Time Series — From the Single Photograph to the Sequence
In early Bilder, Feldmann assembled images of similar subjects, bringing the question of what counted as the same kind of thing to the fore, ahead of any one photograph’s individual finish. When a necessary image was missing, he sometimes photographed it himself; the boundary between found and self-made photographs was subordinate to the rules of the edit. *20 Authorship resided in choosing a picture and deciding where it belonged, as much as in operating the camera. In the Time Series of the mid-1970s, Feldmann photographed small actions in succession, such as a woman cleaning a window or a boat moving along a river. Arranged almost frame by frame, ordinary movements unfold gradually across repeated images. *2 He retained the moments before and after an event’s presumed climax, diverging from the custom of choosing one “decisive moment.” The photograph becomes part of an extended observation of time instead of an isolated peak. Keeping similar pictures redirects attention from a supposedly definitive image toward differences between images. Time Series offers no single climactic event; in Bilder, found and personally photographed images may share a page. *2 Preserving adjacent instants of the window-cleaning sequence, or several pictures of one subject, brings minute changes into view that would disappear with a single selection.
All the Clothes of a Woman and 100 Years — Reading a Person Through Possessions and Age
For All the Clothes of a Woman, Feldmann photographed a woman’s garments individually and arranged them in the order in which they would be put on. The woman never appears, yet the number and sequence of garments invite viewers to imagine the body and daily life of their owner. *4 Underwear and outer clothes appear at an equivalent scale, producing a portrait through the sum of possessions. In 100 Years, 101 friends and family members are arranged by age, from an eight-month-old baby to a centenarian. The work held by MoMA allows viewers to encounter each portrait and locate their own age within the sequence. *5 Under this one editorial rule, differences between individuals intersect with the passage of time shared by everyone. *6 Feldmann’s measured distance from conventional portraiture lies in entrusting the sequence to age, instead of using a photograph to explain a subject’s personality. Clothes and ages are external measures that suggest a person’s outline without directly disclosing an inner life. A complete wardrobe structures All the Clothes of a Woman; chronological age structures 100 Years. Individuality and anonymity emerge together within these series of possessions and aging. *5 Both works construct a portrait through rules that exist beyond any single photographic image.
Voyeur — Bringing Images Made for Different Purposes onto the Same Pages
Voyeur is an artist’s book that sequences photographs taken from newspapers and magazines, advertisements, amateur snapshots, and other sources with almost no accompanying explanation. Images accumulated over many years appear here in a new order. *17 Individual authorship and provenance are not used to elevate one photograph over another; instead, the arrangement approximates the speed at which images enter everyday vision. The reader attends to associations produced by neighboring pictures. Across Bilder, Time Series, and Die Toten, selection and order remain the structural principles even when the subjects change. *19 The Serpentine catalog similarly traces Feldmann’s interest in photographs, postcards, posters, and ordinary objects to a common impulse to collect. *18 That impulse continues as the medium shifts from the booklet to the exhibition. In Voyeur, the usual criteria of fine-art photography—high resolution or the reputation of a named photographer—recede. Imperfect reproduction, mixed provenance, and the absence of captions draw attention away from the authority of one image and toward connections across pages. When advertising bodies, reported events, family snapshots, and product photographs share a printed surface, familiar rankings of the significant and the trivial, or the public and private, become less secure. *17 Images previously separated by the daily formats of journalism and commerce can be compared within a single book.
Die Toten — Reordering Obituaries and Political Memory
For Die Toten 1967–1993, Feldmann gathered newspaper photographs of more than one hundred people who died in connection with student activism, the RAF, policing, and hostage incidents. He placed the images on gray pages of uniform size. Police officers, terrorists, civilians, and hostages appear in the same format, accompanied only by their names and dates of death. *7 Newspaper coverage organized by individual events becomes one chronological sequence. Editing found photographs here also intervenes in political memory. Removed from their original headlines, the faces no longer simply illustrate a particular news story. Their recontextualization exposes the editorial choices through which the media identify heroes, perpetrators, and victims. Kunsthalle Düsseldorf’s retrospective followed the continuity between Feldmann’s early collections and his historical and political work. *12 A Deichtorhallen exhibition likewise traced his movement between personal collections and public imagery throughout his career. *13 Feldmann leaves the political argument unstated in explanatory captions. The recurrence of faces, names, and dates offers a historical reading different from the event-based newspaper narrative, placing the images under another editorial rule. The years 1967–1993 encompass a turbulent period in West German postwar democracy, from student protest and RAF activity to state security responses and media coverage. Uniform presentation temporarily suspends the familiar question of which side each person occupied. *7 Yet the editor’s decisions remain consequential: Feldmann chose whose death to include, which press image to use, and where to begin and end the chronology. Those choices shape the telling of political history. The recurrence of the dead also resists reducing the period to a few emblematic events or figures. Alongside well-known RAF members, police officers, hostages, and other civilians enter the same temporal record. *7 The collection makes deaths otherwise peripheral to celebrated incidents part of the visual scope of the history. Daniela Kneissl surveys criticism of Die Toten, including objections that placing terrorists and victims in one sequence, stripped of the context of the original reports, obscures political distinctions. She does not share the reading that the work glorifies violence; instead, she interprets its chronology as an attempt at a culture of remembrance and mourning, tracing deaths between 1967 and 1993 as connected history. *26 By bringing differing deaths onto uniform gray pages, the work makes the very act of equating them a subject of critical dispute.
From Bilder to Voyeur — Making Selection After Exposure an Artistic Act
Although Feldmann was recognized through photography, much of his work depended more on editing, reproduction, and collecting than on camera technique. He examined how circulating images and objects shape people’s understanding of reality, and how familiar meanings change when those materials are rearranged. *14 MoMA’s holdings likewise encompass his photographs, books, and installations. *23 Assigning the authorship of a photograph exclusively to the person who took it therefore misses much of his work. His distance from conventional authorship extends to the value attached to signatures and one-of-a-kind objects. In an interview with Frieze, Feldmann expressed discomfort with the label “artist” and described his early booklets as inexpensive reproductions rather than elevated art objects. *10 Collecting and rearranging everyday objects also questions how artistic value is assigned through signature and scarcity. *22 His approach considers how images acquire value in the marketplace, printed media, and the home. Photographs he never took himself entered his work through discovery, reproduction, decisions about size, and order of presentation. *14 These are concrete acts of authorship beyond releasing the shutter, connecting images in everyday circulation to conceptual art through editing. While photography often served to document an idea in conceptual art of the same period, Feldmann took the circulation of existing images as his subject. Even when he did not make the source photograph, he determined which pictures to keep, juxtapose, or place at the end of the series. *23 From Bilder to Voyeur, choices about inclusion, thematic grouping, and page order define how anonymous photographs become artworks.
$100,000 at the Guggenheim — Displaying Reproduction and Exchange Value
After receiving the HUGO BOSS Prize in 2010, Feldmann exchanged its entire $100,000 award for one-dollar bills and pinned them individually to the walls of a Guggenheim gallery. Repeated across the walls, notes of equal denomination reveal their minute individual differences even as they constitute a single monetary total. *15 HUGO BOSS’s account confirms his conversion of the prize money into the exhibit itself. *16 A Kunstpalast retrospective situates this gesture within six decades of collecting, counting, and assigning value. *24 His interest in found photographs had expanded into the quantities and value of reproduced objects. Shadow Play, in the Centre Pompidou collection, extends the material to shadows, toys, and familiar possessions; gathering and repositioning things to structure the conditions of looking remained consistent with his earlier work. *8 His attention to circulation, classification, and reuse also connects with later archival art and artist’s books. The dollar-bill installation follows the same principles of reproduction and repetition as his photo booklets. Currency is a standardized multiple, yet each bill has its own serial number. As with Feldmann’s postcards, newspaper images, and family photographs, the display reveals how society gives different values to large numbers of things that appear alike. *15 Questions of quantity, exchange value, and exhibition institutions carried through to his late installations. From inexpensive booklets to the banknote-covered walls, he used repeated objects to ask how prices, scarcity, signatures, and display sites confer value, treating printed images and dollar bills alike as material for an artwork. *24
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