What Still Remains

“Turning points, in-between states, a beautiful kind of limbo that tugs at the heart and suggests stories of loss and remembrance. That is what photographs are, after all, memorials that stop time and hold it for a moment, for our contemplation. If Backhaus’s photographs are partly memorials to lost combs and half-eaten apples, they surely allude, as well, to other things that have been lost along the way.“—Jean Dykstra

Following the success of Jessica Backhaus’ first book, Jesus and the Cherries, about life in rural Poland, What Still Remains is a photo series made up of fifty works created since 2006 in various locations. Backhaus, a German American photographer, now pursues in this new cycle of photographs the question of why things that have been forgotten or left behind pop up in specific places and then seem to take on a life of their own.

Jessica Backhaus, born in Germany in 1970, studied photography and visual communications in Paris. Here she met Gisèle Freund, who became her mentor. In 1995 her passion for photography drew her to New York. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Martin- Gropius-Bau, Berlin. Backhaus is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York and The Photographers’ Gallery in London.

Jean Dykstra, editor-at-large of Photograph magazine, is a Brooklyn-based photography critic and editor who contributes to a number of publications, including Art on Paper and Art in America.