1. FELDMANN'S FASCINATING IMAGE WORLD

I was 17 when I acquired my first book of Hans-Peter Feldmann's Das Museum im Kopf (The Museum in the Head, 1989). The title lodged itself in my mind, where it has remained to the present day. The title is paradigmatic of Feldmann's practice: that is, of his ideas of archive and collective memory, and his strategy of taking everyday images - those that attract our attention in newspapers, magazines and photography albums - and bringing them together in an imaginary museum of the mind where they can be re-arranged, compared, understood and added to. In Das Museum im Kopf, the separation of the images from their contexts made other elements besides their narrative content important: the vocabulary with which the photograph communicated its meaning (its symbolism and expressiveness), formal aspects such as composition and rhythm, analogies between images and the suggestive character of advertising imagery or the psychological and emotional charge of private family photographs. The new arrangements made it possible to observe the construction of different, sometimes unexpected meanings. I was also fascinated by Feldmann's way of emphasising the denotative function of the images: he presented them without commentary, adding only simple, descriptive titles - '7 Bilder' ('7 pictures', 1970), for example - which resulted in an agglomeration of photographs utterly unremarkable, completely lacking in purpose or message, fully devoid of formal interest and presented in an entirely unpretentious way. Once important photographs were neutralised, suggesting that in our contemporary information-culture 'important' images can no longer be differentiated from the rest. Feldmann's deadpan presentation was emblematic of the postmodern idea that in our culture 'anything goes'.

The next time Feldmann amazed me was