This book shows pictures from the Ketelhodt family’s photo albums. All of the photographs show Ines von Ketelhodt’s father: with his father, his siblings, his bride, his children, and finally with a grandchild. In the nineteen-twenties, the photographs are still in black and white; later, in the fifties and sixties, the first color photos start to appear. The opening motto from Maurice Blanchot (here in a German translation) thematizes the memory, presence and absence of a person:

“the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy, and yet more inaccessibly and mysterious than the thought of the innermost being; without signification, yet summoning up the depth of any possible meaning; unrevealed yet manifest, having that absence-as-presence which constitutes the lure and the fascination of the Sirens”.

15 photographs edited and laser-printed, hand-set (Futura), letterpress printed, translucent and mould-made paper, printed cloth-covered boards, 72 pages, 20.8 × 30 cm, 45 numbered and signed copies, Flörsheim 2009

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