Editor’s Note

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 echo throughout his career. These works, drawn from the exhibition Punctum, make visible how photography shapes his vision, not as documentary evidence but as a field of memory, transformation, and poetic fracture.

The title recalls Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, where punctum is the detail that pricks the viewer, the element that resists explanation and enters memory. Kiefer’s photographs carry such a force. They are not moments captured but events imagined, as if remembering what never was.

Buildings, sunflowers, and ruins recur, each dissolved and reconstituted through processes of solarization, chemical washes, and the embedding of metals. The result is a surface at once photographic and painterly, a space where light corrodes into shadow and clarity yields to aura. The sunflower darkens, yet still turns toward an absent sun. The ruined tower leans, yet still stands against a storm of chemical skies.

These works reveal photography not as a medium of record but as an alchemical ground for Kiefer’s imagination. They hold ruin and renewal in the same frame, and in their transformations they remind us that memory itself is unstable, fragmentary, and yet insistent.