The work is exclusively composed of 1200 photos of faces that the artist had already used in previous works. As explained in the video, the photographs come from many different sources: some of them, depicting Spanish criminals, were picked out from a newspaper called “El Caso”; others, representing both criminals and victims, were found in 1960s detective magazines; other pictures were part of French or German photo albums, were bought at a flea market in Berlin, are photographs of people from Jewish schools of the pre-war years, or are those of Swiss people who are, by the time the work is exhibited, all dead. Menschlich was thus built with Boltanski’s own photographic archives of found photographs.

Like the contemporary artists mentioned by West, the artist believes that photography is linked to death and the past, that it kills things while trying to preserve and save them: “the moment you take a photograph of something, 3 minutes later, it’s something that no longer exists”. Moreover, photography kills and replaces us all. It replaces you after your death, when your relatives can no longer remember precisely what you looked like without looking at a photo of you. It definitely kills you “when someone picks up your photo and no one knows who you are”.

This is what happens when one is looking at the faces of those people on the photographs: one cannot say anything about them except that they existed and they were human. Since it is impossible to know anything else with certainty, Boltanski’s main purpose is not to invite the viewer to imagine a story, but to make him draw some conclusions about characteristics that are shared by all these faces, to think of the things that make all these people similar, rather than concentrating on the details that make them singular, and through which one could be tempted to figure out how their lives were.