cularly useful for these mythmaking projects, since
viewers tend to have an automatic trust in the inher-
ent veracity of photographic documents.
Boltanski subsequently became interested in
inventing other people’s stories, and began repho-
tographing found snapshots of strangers. In the
1971 projectPhoto Album of the Family D., 1939–
1964 , he attempted to reassemble such pictures
into a linear narrative, knowing he would always
fail, since photographs cannot reveal truth as we
often expect them to. There is also a somber under-
tone to Boltanski’s found photographs to the
extent that they convey a sense of loss and absence.
They are images that have been stripped of their
original meanings by being separated from their
original owners.
In the mid-1980s Boltanski created a series of
works entitledMonuments, for which he recycled
pictures of children’s faces, usually re-photographed
from school portraits and blown up into blurry,
ghostlike visages. The images were installed in dar-
kened rooms, in some instances placed over stacks of
rusted tin biscuit boxes, and illuminated by electric
bulbs placed around each picture. The effect is of a
Catholic shrine with icons illuminated by candles.
Though these installations are referred to as monu-
ments, which suggests the commemoration of
deceased individuals, it is not the loss of life being
mourned but the loss of childhood and of memory.
These pieces can also be interpreted as references to
the Jews killed in the Holocaust—an event that
often haunts Boltanski’s installations without
being directly invoked. Boltanski’s preoccupation
with the lost histories of anonymous figures contin-
ued in a project entitledReserve: The Dead Swiss, for
which he assembled photographs cut from the obit-
uary pages of Swiss newspapers. He specifically
chose to memorialize people from Switzerland be-
causetheylackastrongculturalorhistoricalassocia-
tion; the neutrality of the Swiss nation thus lends
itself to universality.
Crucial to Boltanski’s artistic method is a perpe-
tual recycling of images. He not only lifts photo-
graphs from mass media and photo albums into his
own work, he also lifts images from his own past
projects and inserts them into new ones. In 1987
Boltanski created an installation for Documenta 8
entitledArchive, which was essentially the sum total
of all the portrait images he had ever used for pre-
vious projects. Such a practice underlines Boltan-
ski’s belief in the fluidity and ephemerality of
materials, and disavowal of the notion of the eternal
and unique art object.
Boltanski has also been consistently interested in
problematizing the notions of good and evil, parti-
cularly in relationship to the events of World War II.
He has frequently explored the idea that atrocities
such as the Holocaust can be committed by anyone,
and do not require a supernaturally diabolic im-
pulse—a concept defined by Hannah Arendt as the
banality of evil. In his 1995 installationMenschlich
(Humanity), Boltanski interspersed the images of
Nazis and their victims across a gallery wall, not
differentiating between the guilty and innocent.
The following year he carried a similar idea into
the installationThe Concessions, which involves
images of murderers and their victims projected
onto curtains throughout the middle of the gallery.
On the walls are hung several photographs of the
victims’ mutilated bodies, which are covered by cur-
tains but periodically revealed when a fan placed in
the room causes these coverings to levitate. Again,
the artist does not identify which are criminals and
which are victims.
Throughout his career Boltanski has maintained
his devotion to impoverished materials, subordinat-
ing formal concerns in favor of story and process.
He has held fast to the belief that the universality of
his message depends on the commonness of his
materials and means. He is married to artist-photo-
grapher Annette Messager and continues to live and
work in Paris.SHANNONWearing
Biography
Born in Paris, France, 6 September 1944. Artist in Resi-
dence, Deutscher Akademischer Austausdienst (D.A.A.
D.), Berlin, Germany, 1975; Guest Artist, Harvard Uni-
versity, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981. Living in
Paris.Individual Exhibitions
1973 Les Inventaires; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden,
Germany, and traveling
1978 Arbeiten: 1968–1978; Badischer Kunstverein, Karls-
ruhe, Germany
1979 Sonnabend Gallery; New York
1981 Compositions; A.R.C./Muse ́e d’Art Moderne de la
Ville de Paris, Paris, France
1984 Boltanski; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
1987 Le Lyce ́e Chases; Kunstverein fu ̈r Rheinland und
Westfalen, Du ̈sseldorf, GermanyBOLTANSKI, CHRISTIAN