While browsing an auction site full of second-hand snapshots, Erik Lieber (NL) noticed an image that he thought he had seen shortly before. Searching back, he did indeed find a similar image, and then a couple more. This is how, in early 2014, he bought the first five images of what would grow into a collection of 929 amateur snapshots over the next ten years. Each one sourced from countless overcrowded American webshops. A search process that was never intended, let alone pursued, but became increasingly unavoidable.

Monumental Moments consists of prints of anonymous private snapshots. Lieber calls them ‘orphan snapshots’. They show an unknown Japanese ‘Mom’ and ‘Girl’ in various locations between around 1955 and 1996. Many snapshots were made into several, often different types of prints. The collection is almost entirely defined by the repetitive manner in which both women were photographed, preferably in or near tourist attractions in at least 14 countries. A kind of protracted Grand Tour over several decades, beginning and ending in their home situation.

The way Monumental Moments is composed is not an attempt to reconstruct the life of this unknown Japanese family. Nor is it an attempt at anecdotal narrative. To what end? And for whom? Each picture looks like an ordinary family snapshot. But the more the collection grew, the more questions it raised. It was precisely in this overwhelming quantity of anonymous portraits that it became clear how much remained invisible and elusive. What is happening here? Where does it come from? Why all the repetition and duplication? What are we actually looking at? It stimulates the imagination. Two themes in particular contribute to this: the endless series of “self-image portraits” And the apparent fate of these snapshots, imbued with so much personal attention, only to end up out on the curb. Monumental Moments evokes associations and questions about the transience of self-images. Is this perhaps a memento mori?

With an essay by Erik Lieber.