Retracing

Retracing is a research project about perception, memory, photography and the possibility of imagelessness. Rein Jelle Terpstra collaborates with people who are slowly losing their sight. He asked them about their most valuable visual memory and photographed these scenes on Kodachrome diapositive, thereby promising them to - years later - read out loud precise descriptions of the images, in an attempt to retrace these images in their minds. Retracing is about parting and loss. Perception lost its naturalness, with photography getting an ambiguous role in the conservation of images. Before turning the project into a book, Terpstra used the images of Retracing in a tripartite slide-installation, in which the images slowly fade into one another. This phenomenon is represented in the book by alternating pages showing photographs of projections in the dark with pages showing the slides. The paper is slightly transparent so to create the effect of fading.