Photography has always haunted Anselm Kiefer's practice. Long before his monumental canvases and installations, he turned to his father's 35mm camera in 1968, beginning a dialogue with the medium that would run through his career. These works, drawn from the exhibition Punctum, show how photography shapes his vision: not documentary evidence, but a ground for memory and transformation.

The title recalls Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, where the punctum is the detail that pricks the viewer, the element that resists explanation and lodges in memory. Kiefer's photographs carry that force. They read less like moments captured than events imagined, as if remembering what never was.

Buildings, sunflowers, and ruins recur, each dissolved and reconstituted through solarization, chemical washes, the embedding of metal. The surface no longer separates photograph from painting: light corrodes into shadow, clarity gives way to blur. The sunflower darkens but keeps turning toward a sun that's no longer there. The tower leans into a sky the color of chemical weather, still standing.

What these works reveal isn't documentation. It's Kiefer's imagination working directly on the world's own materials, ruin and renewal held in the same frame. Memory, it turns out, was never as stable as the camera pretends.

The Editor