Christian Boltanski - Kaddish - 1998

Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Last Years," Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, May 15–October 4, 1998. With a simple and spare vocabulary, and a minimal yet imposing presentation, the "Last Years" exhibition focused on the relationship between absence and presence in humankind, on memory, the loss of identity through oblivion and disappearance, but also on the personal and unique history of each individual within the mass of the collective and of anonymity. It thus exemplified the emotional, human, even humanist dimension of Christian Boltanski's work.

The book consists solely of black and white photographs divided into four themes: Menschlich (Human); Sachlich (Objective); Ortlich (Local); Sterblich (Mortal). The Kaddish (Hebrew: קדיש qaddish, "sanctification") is one of the central pieces of Jewish liturgy. Apart from Menschlich, which dates from 1993, the photos of men and women are taken from 16 series of images used by Boltanski between 1972 and 1973, and mixed in a random order, in which it is impossible to distinguish victims from perpetrators.