Geister is the third work in the series Spuren, which expands on the book to engage with themes of time, heritage, and nature as a witness to the contemporary world. For Geister, I once again manipulated, transformed, and rearranged the found material.

Each printing plate for the book was kept in storage together with an irregularly shaped and, in some instances, collaged piece of tissue paper, which I brought into focus for Geister. The handmade overlay served as a stencil in letterpress printing, individually calibrating the printing process. While key to the picture’s appearance, it was a tool of image control and remained invisible as such.

The photographic series brings this tool into view. Using a high-end scanner, I enlarged the stencils, throwing their materiality and any details into sharp relief. Shadowy traces of the original photographs can be made out here and there.

The tools emerge as ghosts of a sort. Functional and pictorial traces overlap, engendering abstract image-bodies that cannot be assigned to an ideology, a place, or a time. They 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?

While the photographic series uncovers the stencils’ internal structure, the edition focuses on their outward shape. The paper bodies are reduced to their outlines and appear as black vacant forms.

They were printed from custom-made printing plates on an Original Heidelberg Platen Press, the exact type of machine used to manufacture the photographs in the book Waljäger in 1939. The machine stays the same, but its function shifts: instead of reproducing photographic motifs, it now begets shadowy forms—projection screens devoid of pictures.

The placement of the shapes varies from sheet to sheet, with reference to the corresponding photographic image in the book. They read as pieces of debris of a past visual regime and vestiges of the idealization and subjugation of nature.