The Whispering of Things

In 2008, Swiss artist Thomas Krempke began taking pictures every day.
He prints them and pastes them into notebooks, correlates them and writes about them. The upshot is a log of his perceptions, a photographic diary, a cartography of what he sees. He photographs wherever he happens to be, whatever he chances upon. He doesn’t take anything out or add anything to the images, not even light. The pictures don’t show any extraordinary occurrences: no wars, poverty, exotic landscapes, but what we call everyday life. And yet photographing everyday life alters it: the world is no longer the same as the camera delves deeper and deeper beneath surface appearances, taking us on an almost microscopic expedition into hitherto unseen, undiscovered realms. It gives a new dignity, even grandeur and poetry, to everyday objects and shifts the scales of magnitude and importance. Krempke sets his pictures against the ubiquitous flood of media pictures, thereby creating a parallel world for himself, a coded version of his life—as in memory or a dream. As in waking up in the morning, when perception still oscillates between the inner images of nighttime and the outer images of daytime, he photographs in a state of wakeful dreaming, clear-sighted somnambulism—intuitively following his impulses, without intention. In his montage of pictures and texts, he explores his day-to-day perceptions, his way of looking and photographing things, and ultimately the creation of his conception of the world.