Agfacolor is a slide film that made color photography possible starting in the late 1930s. The series emerged from research on RAL standard colors: archives were examined for original color photographs from World War II, revealing Agfacolor slides by German propaganda troops. However, these photographs proved unsuitable for reconstructing historical colors – the chemical layers of the film material had changed over the decades and proved unstable.
This impossibility of reconstruction became the starting point for the series. The aged film material develops its own visual logic: scratches on the slides, archival dust, and color shifts caused by aging become image-forming elements. The enlarged sections no longer show the documented reality, but rather the material trace of time itself.
The destruction of the image carrier references the destruction caused by National Socialism – both materially and socially. What began as technical failure reveals the impossibility of an unbroken reconstruction of this history.
Agfacolor is a slide film that made color photography possible starting in the late 1930s. The series emerged from research on RAL standard colors: archives were examined for original color photographs from World War II, revealing Agfacolor slides by German propaganda troops. However, these photographs proved unsuitable for reconstructing historical colors – the chemical layers of the film material had changed over the decades and proved unstable.
This impossibility of reconstruction became the starting point for the series.
