Claus Goedicke opens (...) trap doors. He photographs objects while thinking of people. „Our voice is in the potato“ he remarks, „in shoes, in a calendar, in a pencil.“ (...)
One memory has a special importance for him. How, as an adult early one morning (...) he stands in the kitchen of his aged Grandmother in order to make coffee. It isn’t customary for him to do so, but he, Grandson Claus, is getting ready to turn on the coffeemaker. The door opens and his Grandmother comes in, clad in a nightgown, cardigan, and slippers; uncombed and without her false teeth. He wishes her good morning. She seems bewildered at being caught without her dentures. Unable to return his greeting without her teeth, she shuts the door again with a suddenness she had never displayed before.
This teeth are all that remain of his Grandmother. They made her a person in her old age; without them she could not speak; could not, or would not, utter a word of greeting. The lifelike prosthesis replacing the upper teeth. Dental technicians fashioned it by making use of tools and their dexterous hands capable of complex tasks. (...) It became part of her identity. Indispensible. Later on, when it was no longer needed, it lay on a a marble top, which lay on the table beneath the plate camera. It had to lie there, in the diffuse light, as a chapter in the story that Claus Goedicke relates.
from: Christoph Ribbat, Claus Goedicke, Fotograf der Dinge
issued in Dinge Verlag Schirmer /Mosel, 2017
