Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
We all die twice—once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.
I think that all human activity is stupid. Artistic activity is also stupid, but you can see it more clearly.
The more you work, the less you exist. I believe (at least, I used to believe, because I no longer think this is entirely true) that the artist is like someone carrying a mirror in which everyone can look and recognize themselves, so that the person who carries the mirror ends up being nothing.
No, I never take photographs myself. I don’t feel like a photographer, more like a recycler.
The photo replaces the memory. When someone dies, after a while you can’t visualize them anymore, you only remember them through their pictures.
Photography is used to give evidence, and the evidence is always deceiving.
In most of my photographic pieces I have manipulated the quality of the evidence that people assign to photography, in order to subvert it, or to show that photography lies—that what it conveys is not reality but a set of cultural codes.
I don’t want viewers to discover; I want them to recognize.