Abstract
At the 1985 Intermedia Congress in Hamburg, there was a picture exhibition that did not show a single picture: "Pictures in our Minds. Pictures in our Minds". On black boards, visitors could read the descriptions of 40 photos, for example "Albert Einstein sticks out his tongue", "Naked Vietnamese child fleeing the village of Trang Bang after a napalm attack", "Willy Brandt kneeling at the memorial of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto". One may not even know the details (which memorial?) - the images arise in the mind of the viewer. "The photos went around the world. They frightened us, shook us up, amused us. The pictures have one thing in common: they do not escape the viewer's mind again so quickly," said the then First Mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi. They are key images, components of the imaginary museum, they are not stored in the heads of individual people, "but in the collective, common memory. My individual recognition is a retrieval of the collective, here visual memory" (Kutter 1987, p. 104). Archetypes of modernity? They are "in the head, not the minds" (Kutter 1987, p. 104), say "something essential about our situation" (Kutter 1987, p. 106) - undisputed, but how do they do it and why so successfully?
