ACHROMATIC HISTORY is an ongoing series that uses illustrated magazines from the heyday of photojournalism, roughly from the 1950’s until the 1970’s. From the magazine pages selected photo spreads of historical events like the Apollo 13 mission to the moon or the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City are exposed to sunlight long enough to bleach. Before exposure objects like DVDs, coins or keys are placed onto the magazine pages, so that their silhouettes will stand out in the initial colour on the faded page and thus highlight certain elements.
ACHROMATIC HISTORY thus interweaves several layers of time. The first layer is the time of the photographed event. As the magazine’s former status as the mainstream medium has since been lost to TV and successively to the World Wide Web it is not only the photographs of the historical events, but also the magazines themselves that represent the past in a concrete way.
This past gets overwritten with additional layers of time. The first one is indicated by the silhouettes of objects used in our everyday lives: everyone carries a key and change in their pockets. The choice of these objects thus refers to our present lives.
The third layer of time incorporated is the time acting as agent to the employed «imaging technique»: the fading does not take place in a moment—such as the instant it takes to expose a roll of film—but during a period of roughly two months of exposure to sunlight.
