Text and picture, the two components of description, are thereby subject to their specific possibilities for existence inside and outside time; the text, itself tied to the stretching of time, and the picture which exists without a purpose, and which seems to intend to make a certain moment present for us. Gerz gives the two elements aspects of timelessness in his particular use, when he uses the narrative time of the texts in the time-indifferent form of the past, which in the European culture of writing both eliminates the working time of the writer and transposes the time-quality of the action into an incomprehensible dimension. That corresponds with the way photography withdraws from all the intended certainties of place, time and space; what is most apparent in the pictures in Gerz’s foto/texts is their own lack of direction, their refusal to be read or identified. The certainty of our usual attitudes in reading and seeing, most of which are based on the reconstructability of time and place, is broken open in favour of uncertainties that are directed to the viewer’s and reader’s own actions: the certainty of time, which ultimately remains to us, is what is necessary for us to perceive and understand the work of art.

Ulrich Krempel 1988