Thomas Demand: Images, Memory, and the Construction of History
Proa’s Education team introduces the retrospective “Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History” through an overview of the German artist’s career. The session explores his relationship with history and memory, his working methods, and the ways he constructs and reconstructs narratives from press photographs.
Led by Proa’s Education team, the session offers a reading of the retrospective through the central questions that run through Demand’s work, including his relationship with history and memory—two dimensions closely connected to his approach to images. His works often begin with photographs published in the media, which he uses as references to recreate scenes, spaces, and objects using structures made of paper and cardboard.
This process creates a distance between an event and its representation. Demand reconstructs what a photograph records, alters its conditions, and photographs it again. The result retains the appearance of a documentary image, although what lies behind it is a scene built specifically for the photograph.
Through this process, the class examines the operations involved in producing his works and how reconstruction can alter the relationship between image, event, and memory. Press photographs no longer function solely as records of an event; they become materials through which Demand works and constructs new narratives.
From Duchamp to Demand: Appropriation as an Artistic Strategy
Appropriation is one of the fundamental artistic strategies of the 20th and 21st centuries: taking existing images, objects, or ideas and giving them new meaning. The class explores different forms of appropriation across key artists and movements, from Marcel Duchamp and pop art to conceptual art, before turning to Demand’s photographs.
Through a range of works and moments in art history, this new online class examines appropriation as a central strategy in 20th- and 21st-century art. Preexisting images, objects, and ideas become starting points for considering how a fresh perspective can transform their meanings.
From Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to pop art and conceptual art, different approaches emerge to incorporating and reinterpreting existing materials. Each of these practices also raises questions about originality, authorship, and the construction of artistic meaning.
Towards the end of this exploration, Thomas Demand’s work offers an opportunity to examine these issues from a contemporary perspective. His work raises further questions about the relationships between image, memory, and representation, and the possibilities that emerge when a familiar reference is placed in a new context.
Appropriation also runs through debates surrounding mechanical reproduction, the mass circulation of images, and the expansion of mass media—phenomena that play an increasingly prominent role in contemporary artistic production.
The German Gaze: From New Objectivity to Thomas Demand
Proa’s Education team traces the major transformations in 20th-century German photography, from interwar experiments to contemporary work, examining different approaches to the relationship between photography, documentation, and reality.
In interwar Germany, New Objectivity established an approach attentive to the forms of the modern world. Photographers such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Karl Blossfeldt developed methods grounded in observation, sharp focus, and description. Portraits, buildings, plants, machines, and objects were recorded with a precision that downplayed the photographer’s subjectivity and focused attention on what stood before the camera.
Several decades later, this tradition found a distinctive continuation in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. From the late 1950s onwards, the couple systematically photographed industrial structures—water towers, blast furnaces, storage facilities, and factories—using consistent framing, lighting, and viewpoints. Organized into series and typologies, these images turned documentary practice into a method of classification and comparison.
The Bechers’ influence extended to the Düsseldorf School, where they taught from the 1970s onwards. Artists such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth adopted and transformed this legacy through new scales, technologies, and approaches to space, architecture, portraiture, and the circulation of images.
Within this lineage, Thomas Demand makes a fundamental contribution. His photographs do not directly record the spaces they depict. Instead, he begins with existing images—from the media, archives, and the Internet—and reconstructs those settings at full scale using paper and cardboard. After photographing them, he destroys the models.
The session also revisits connections with “Urban Spaces,” an exhibition held at Proa, to examine the continuities, resonances, and influences linking different generations of German photographers. Topics include the representation of architecture and the urban landscape, the tensions between documentation and construction, and the various conceptions of objectivity throughout the history of photography.
Thomas Demand and Contemporary Visual Culture
How the Internet, social media, and digital platforms have transformed our relationship with images and, with it, the ways we understand the present and construct memory. Drawing on concepts from contemporary visual culture, the class critically examines photography and the ways it circulates, establishing connections with Thomas Demand’s work.
We live immersed in a universe of images. Press photographs, digital archives, television, advertising, social media, and digital platforms are an inescapable part of everyday life, shaping how we understand the present and remember the past. Visual culture scholars such as W. J. T. Mitchell and Nicholas Mirzoeff have argued that images are more than objects we contemplate: they form part of systems of representation and power that organize what a society makes visible.
Through a historical overview, the class traces the transformations brought about by the Internet, from the earliest uses of the Web to the emergence of tools such as Google Images. These changes have radically altered our relationship with photography, memory, and forms of visual knowledge.
Led by Proa’s Education Department, the session explores key concepts for understanding contemporary visual culture, including post-photography and photography on social media. It also examines recent phenomena associated with liminal aesthetics, non-places, and the uncanny, drawing connections with some of the questions present in Thomas Demand’s work.
The class offers tools for analyzing today’s visual landscape and questioning the apparent transparency with which images present themselves to us.