I was never good with names and my memory tends to be very selective. There are a number of those who I knew but whose names I’ve forgotten. And when I try to picture them in my mind, even their faces often remain incomplete and deformed. For some, I can’t even remember the circumstances in which I got to know them for a while. All that remains printed in my mind is a certain detail, an impression - a characteristic look, a specific gesture or an expression, and sometimes just a feeling. Everything around that is chaos, a decomposed mess of fragments too small to make any sense out of.



The series “I was Here” is an attempt to visualize this. To photograph the memory of those that are long gone from my life by capturing decaying faces of strangers just before they would forever disappear from the walls of Berlin. Often surrounded by strange, abstract immediate surroundings, they became part of a context different from the one when they were first glued to their wall. But it seems as if this surrounding decay spoke of them, of their situation, character, of how they feel or what they want. It completes their facial expression and their poise, it somehow makes them whole. But just like memory, the images decay or change with time, and sometimes only days after I first saw them and took their picture, they are already gone – torn away and disappeared without a trace. These photographs remain the only thing left of them when they were there. On them, they find themselves once again in a new context, and with a new name.





Blaž Kutin, July 2013