272 Pages

Hans-Peter Feldmann's 272 Pages is exactly what its title says: a catalogue built almost entirely from the artist's own pictures and objects, with barely any curatorial text standing between the reader and the work.

Helena Tatay edited the book. It was published in 2001 by Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona, together with Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, Fotomuseum Winterthur, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. The occasion was Feldmann's exhibition at the Tapies, held from November 2001 to January 2002. The book surveys his practice from the late 1960s on. It sequences found and taken photographs and everyday objects without captions, treating the book as one more Feldmann work rather than a conventional retrospective document. Short contributions come from Regis Durand, Nuria Enguita Mayo, Peter Fischli, Hans Haacke, and Martin Parr.

Feldmann spent five decades collecting and rephotographing found imagery: amateur snapshots, postcards, newspaper clippings. He used repetition and anonymity to question authorship and the market's premium on originality. Other books built the same way include Voyeur and 100 Jahre, each assembled as a sequence of images with almost no text.