2016: Erased Lamppost



For her Erased Lamppost series, Amie Dicke worked with found photographs from the Merkelbach Collection. Merkelbach was a portrait studio based in Amsterdam from 1913 until 1969 and its archive contained more than 40,000 portraits on glass negatives which are stored in Amsterdam City Archives and can nowadays be viewed online.
Dicke looked at the photos one by one on the laptop in her studio, zooming in on “accidental” details and unintentional elements, such as a hand tucked in a pocket, a woman peering from a window or the titular lamppost, which was destined to be edited from the commercial image.
A book of the same name was published in an edition of 30, the first of which was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.