Is photography suitable for representing the complex mechanisms of memory and for making the viewer aware of their subjectivity and fragility? Memories are often perceived as truth but they are no unadulterated reproduction of what happened, rather than a subjective perception, influenced, colored, manipulated by a wide variety of external and internal influencing factors. One's own experiences, the social context and own perspectives form an individual image of reality in the memory. A photograph always bears the photographer's signature and influences the effect on the viewer, through the choice of motive, the detail, the perspective, the exposure, etc., while the viewer itself is subjectively influenced by his own memories. Memories have a fragmentary and deceptive character. They can be falsified, superimposed, manipulated, blinded, glossed over, relativized or prioritized. Sometimes they are deleted, covered up or repressed but certain triggers, such as places or images, can evoke sup conscious or preconscious memories. Perception and memories influence each other and create an ambivalence between
the visible and the perceived, between what has happened and what has been experienced.
In this work, the mechanisms of memory and forgetting and the ambivalence of experience and memory are examined and presented using photography. The interweaving of acquired memory with one's own perception is presented on the basis of the Odenwald School. This object of investigation, with its ambiguous history between romanticization and traumatization, serves as a place of remembrance and a trigger for memories. A view of the inner process is developed in the form of a photographic work with own photographs and selected archive material, using various forms of representation.