The family album is in itself a compendium of photographic documents laden with emotional value with which the viewer has close personal ties. Trepte appears intent, however, on radically eliminating this emotive dimension in favour of conceptual and analytical deconstruction. Every page of the bound volumes is filled with binary code, long numerical series of ones and zeroes that constitute the typical tool of computer language. These sequences of figures are the translation into binary code of the images described on the covers in a cursory style that seems a perfect match for the unadorned and purely functional logic of the numerical code.
Trepte thus investigates the emotional character of the digital photograph by placing its constituent “material” in the foreground. The artist displays what normally remains hidden, namely the extremely abstract and linear nature of digital images in contrast with the “magic” of the emotions that a photograph can arouse. His work provides a perfect illustration of Wilhelm Flusser’s thesis about the relationship between the image and linear writing: “The method consisted in removing the elements of the image (the pixels) from the surface and arranging them in lines. This is how they invented linear writing and codified the circular time of magic (the magic of images) in the linear time of history.”

Cody Trepte (USA, 1983)

The conceptual artist Cody Trepte addresses the complex subject of the digital coding of the various forms of expression with particular reference to the problem of translating visual and verbal language into a computer programming code. Photo Album arrives at a solution of extreme concision in formal terms with 75 hand-made books of A4 paper arranged in a row on a shelf. The front cover of each presents a brief but objective description of a photograph that is not visible to the viewer but understood to form part of the family album – and hence the private sphere – of the artist, who thus becomes the object of his work.