Books
Works on Memory is a collection of essays and images charting the last ten years of Portuguese artist Daniel Blaufuks’ practice, published on the occasion of his exhibition at Ffotogallery. The distinct black & white format of the book is based on designs by the French publishing imprint Série Noire who released detective thrillers in the 1950s.
Daniel Blaufuks is an artist fascinated by the processes of memory – how we construct meaning in our lives through the accrual of details and traces, from the mental residue and after-images of our daily existence. Blaufuks is interested not only in the ways that photography and film are changing as media, but also in the methods by which we archive, store and retrieve information – our ability to remember.
Blaufuks' photographic images of film canisters, cassette tapes, celluloid film strips and negatives etc. remind us that as each analogue ‘memory container’ is superceded by new technological developments, our capacity to record data may increase exponentially, but something is also lost in the process. With a keen eye Blaufuks observes these evolutionary changes in the way we make, distribute and read images, curious to understand how our future memory will be different.
For Blaufuks, photography is more than simply a trigger for retrieving past memories. Photography is memory.
