A tin torch with a round glass lens and this tiny switch that always got my fingernail caught on it. An Agfa colour film can, the coarse old-fashioned kitchen grater (I still use it) and many more… Things. Everyday, small things from the past, but together they tell a big story. This is the latest book by artist Johannes Gramm and at the same time it’ s the conclusion of an art project he has been researching and working on for four years.
Even more than the materials and forms of the real objects in the book and their photos with the always same slate grey background, the objects themselves are universal and familiar memories that are awakened in the reader quite immediately. At the end of the book’s 400 pages, Johannes Gramm tells us in short texts what memories he himself has of the individual objects. In this sense, the book is also an autobiography. But because the author includes his own environment as well as the world in his reflections – and the things depicted are themselves easily recognizable for everyone – it has not become an ego-document but rather a novel – a cultural sketch of an era or perhaps of a life. Johannes Gramm gave the subtitle to that book: Memories and their objects in daylight.

A beautiful and artfully executed journey through time is the book ‘Dinge | Things’. The foreword is by Hein Goemans and another text by Christiane Kuhlmann.Cees Maas

Johannes Gramm, *1964 in Essen, Germany. Lives and works in Ruhrgebiet, Germany and Zeeland (NL).

Winner of the German Photo Book Prize 2021/22 in silver
in the category “Conceptual-artistic photo book”