swimmers, trees, and sailboats, and these serializa-
tions closely suggested the works of Bernd and
Hilla Becher. He self-published these booklets as
simple stapled brochures in various sizes as black-
and-white offset publications with no annotation
or commentary on what was being presented. The
covers were gray cardboard, the title was stamped
in blue, and they were not signed; the maximum
print run was one thousand.
Feldman’s first booklet was 12 Bilder (12
Images; 1968). For these 12 images of airplanes
in the sky, he took more than 100 photos and
edited them down to a dozen. He had also pub-
lished booklets that feature just one image. Most
characteristically, however, Feldmann errs on the
side of excess. For example, to ridicule normative
aesthetics and the interchangeability of images, he
collects his series of subjects from calendars,
books, and postcards or from amateur and profes-
sional photographers, often choosing the most
banal and hackneyed sorts of imagery and pre-
senting often over 100 images. Feldmann preferred
that the average number of objects and photo-
graphic representations mirror each other. The
number of publications per year varied; in 1968
there were two, and in 1972 there were seven. In
one instance, in3 Bilder(1976), he substitutes the
images with descriptions, which made clear how
close his work is to conceptual art. (In a reverse
strategy, he once answered interview questions by
providing photographic images.) The exhibitions
of these booklets are as unpretentious as the book-
lets themselves; in museums and galleries they are
tethered by cords from the ceiling or lie on tables
that the visitors may handle them.
In1977,FeldmannshowedhisBilderfundus(Fund
of Images), which he described as a ‘‘copy of the
world,’’ in the Folkwang-Museum in Essen, Ger-
many. The museum exhibition of these materials as
well as their display in booklets raised questions
aboutthetraditionalconceptofartandwork:photos
are trivial, and these are readymades and reproduc-
tions. In the age of mass media the artistic original
has become, for Feldmann, a dubious category.
Before 1968, under the influence of Konrad Kla-
pheck, who like Ritcher was a professor at the
Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Feldmann painted pre-
cise representations of simple objects, avoiding any
of the individual style that would later emerge.
According to an often-circulated anecdote, he cre-
ated his large-format photographs that are difficult
to transport to demonstrate to gallery workers how
the reproduction replaces the original. The ensuing
departure from painting and the general breakup of
the concept of art have their origins in the political,
social, and cultural movements of the 1960s, in
which the power of mass-media images was evident:
when millions of people followed their television
screens for the moon landing, the Vietnam War,
the student protests, and the civil rights demons-
trations and media theorist Marshall McLuhan be-
came a cult figure. Reactions in art abounded: at the
1972 Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany there was an
exhibition of title pages of the German weekly news-
magazineDer Spiegelfrom 1960 to 1972.
Although Feldmann has often been portrayed as
an artistic maverick, his work joins that of many
other American and European artists reacting to
the disruptions of the 1960s. Feldman himself has
pointed to an intellectal closeness of his work espe-
cially to Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers,
Gilbert & George, and French conceptual painter
Daniel Buren. His work has many affinities to that
of Ed Ruscha, who also created booklets of collec-
tions of images. Like the French artist Christian
Boltanski, Feldmann creates archives from the mas-
sive archive of vernacular photography, family
snapshots, and other images that are often over-
looked. Although his work was not as well known
as these figures in the 1960s and 1970s, he later was
recognized as having a seminal role in the develop-
ment of conceptual photography in the 1980s, and
has even been identified as an early example of
appropriation as an artistic strategy.
Feldmann also created books, which were essen-
tially collections of his brochures, where he displayed
comprehensive photo series, interconnections of the
media, and documentations of periods of time.
Many remain unpublished; others accompanied
exhibitions, such asEine Stadt: Essen from 1977.
Because it thematized German left-wing terrorism,
very much like Gerhard Richter’s cycle on the Red
Army faction,18 Oktober 1977,Feldmann’sself-
published bookDie Toten [The Dead], 1967–1993
(1998) caused a sensation, with its 95 photographs of
terrorists and their victims culled from the news
media. Feldmann’s contribution to the end of the
century was100 Jahre, photographs of 101 people
from his circle of family and friends, beginning with
an eight-week-old baby and ending with a 100 year
old woman.
As a logical consequence of his work, Feldmann
also used the media itself as a platform. Without
securing the cooperation of the publishers, he ma-
naged to have photos placed in feature and busi-
ness sections of Cologne newspapers that had no
relationship to the text and no caption. He smug-
gled them in many times, some having no comment
or indication that they were Feldmann’s artistic
contributions. They confirm that we accept emptyFELDMANN, HANS-PETER