Hara Chikei | Erik Lieber's 'Monumental Moments'
Erik Lieber's 'Monumental Moments' is an unusual art book compiling about 1000 collected snapshots of an unknown Japanese mother and daughter.Summary
Erik Lieber's art book, 'Monumental Moments' (2024), is an unusual photographic practice compiling approximately 1000 snapshots of an unknown Japanese mother and daughter, which he collected over ten years from various web shops after finding an initial photo on an auction site. These images, taken between around 1955 and 1996 across at least 14 countries, are accumulated typologically, objectifying personal intimacy through repetitive, grand-tour-like compositions against tourist backdrops. Contrasting Lieber's cold stance with the work of Yuki Harada, the article suggests Lieber rejects emotional identification, instead confronting the reality of how private family photos drift through capitalist networks after being sold, revealing the oblivion that results from the loss of the subjects' lives. By reconfiguring these anonymous fragments into a book sequence, the work questions the precariousness of our self-images in a consumer society and functions as a critical media theory practice exposing how the system of photographic memory simultaneously produces forgetting.
(Source：artscape)