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Background information, book review
"'Dinge / Things. Erinnerungen und ihre Gegenstände bei Tageslicht / Memories and their objects in daylight' is the latest book by Johannes GRAMM and at the same time the conclusion of an art project on which he has been researching and working for four years. Even more than the materials and forms of the real objects in the book and their photos with the always same slate gray background, the objects themselves are universal, familiar memories that are awakened in the reader quite immediately.
Contents
A tinny flashlight with a round glass lens and this little switch on which the fingernail kept getting stuck. A can of Agfa color film, the crude old-fashioned kitchen grater (I still use it), and many more... Things. Everyday, small things from the past, but together they tell a great story.
At the end of the 400 pages of the book 'Things' Johannes GRAMM himself tells in short texts what memories he has of the individual objects. In this sense the book is also an autobiography. But because the author includes not only his own environment but also the world in his reflections - and the depicted things are easily recognizable for everyone - it has not become a first-person document, but rather a novel - A cultural sketch of an era or perhaps a life. The artist gave the book the subtitle: Memories and their objects in daylight. A beautiful and artfully executed journey through time, this is the book 'Things'. The foreword is by Hein Goemans and another text by Christiane Kuhlmann." (text somewhat adapted to this WebStore, © Cees Maas)
Additional information
The photo book 'Dinge' by Johannes GRAMM was awarded with the German Photo Book Prize 2021/22 in silver in the category 'Conceptual-artistic photo book'