Geschichte

History is thought. History is an abstract reconstruction of the events in order to make sense of their sequence. Without language in speech and writing and without pictures there would not be any individual story of a human being and also no history of mankind. The latter is the only content of the story, because only humans speak, write, and picture their world. Since the proliferation of smart phones with cameras this happens so often that every day at least one billion photographs are added to the already existing trillions of images. Counting the frames of all movies, videos and television pictures as photos, the sum of all photographed images would rise to a few quadrillion. Historiography becomes photographed history, thereby losing its status as a chronicler of events and changing back into the Istor of Ancient Greece, the witness of the action. Although there is no etymological connection, layers form from photographed time and it only requires sophisticated software to discern them. A single photo is a drop in the daily ocean of proper times, an individual aspect in the holographic sea of our digital reflection of the world. The more is photographed, the more acute will the big picture be, but whether the individual also sees more in it remains debatable. Since time immemorial humans picture hunted and kept animals, their own life, their family and friends and enemies. Together they mark paths to water points and shopping centers and scratch the number of days elapsed into cave or prison walls. Man wants to give sense to the passage of time, so that it shows him the way to the future. Photography helps to remember one's own experience and to organize it within the space as which time is imagined. The images of others show a part of the world, whose people and their history we do not know. When we put these pictures with our own, our own history may change with time. By this we want to cultivate time itself, the flood of images that awaits us in this century will synchronize the proper times and piece together the individual stories for the illustrated history of mankind.

Click here to preview and order the book