title>   Sightings
medium>   offset postcards
date>   1992-98

description> Sightings is a series of postcards commercially printed from snapshots found in public places. The caption on the back of each card records with archival precision the date, site and circumstances of the find, describes any identifying marks, and gives the publication date and my address. The cards relate individual experience to public forms. Travelling the anonymous realm between lost and found, they  enigmatically mark the passage of specific people through particular times and spaces. Melding the functions of snapshots and postcards as conventional forms for remembrance, location and commemoration of individual experience, the project recognizes that the imagery and function of both snapshots and postcards are nevertheless public forms located squarely in popular space. Described by their location in communal rather than familial territory, and recognizable primarily as types (special occasions, pets, etc.), the images are treated as archival specimens garnered from this collective domain.  

Excerpt from Joel Smith, "Roll Over: The Snapshot's Museum Afterlife," Afterimage (Rochester, NY), September-October 2001, p. 8-11:
        "...What to say, what to do about the billions of orphaned images that modern civilization has spun out all around us, and which we cannot prevent sliding through the cracks of history? Why does it (or does it?) matter?
        "In a series titled 'Sightings' (1992-98), Canadian conceptual artist Germaine Koh has, indirectly but strikingly, come close to providing an answer. Saving the snapshots that she found discarded in public areas of cities where she lived over a span of several years, Koh had a commercial firm mass produce full-color picture postcards of selected examples. (The images, as befits their provenance, tend toward the markedly substandard: accidental self-portrait, ripped porno shot, end of the roll, heavily abraded pet picure.) Printed on the reverse side of each card, where a typical postcard's caption would be, is a record of the time and place where the snapshot was found, and the inscriptions it bore.
        "Koh exhibits the cards by slipping them into postcard racks in museum gift shops, to be found and purchased by any patron who comes along. To trace, in imagination, a snpshot's progress through the stages of Koh's project -- from a photographer's attempted treasured memento to a piece of trash to a collector's unique but enigmatic 'find' to a 50-cent commodity, and back again into the indeterminate public realm -- is to witness an inanimate object's full life-cycle of possibilities, as it bears the brunt of desire, hope, clumsiness, indifference, wit, industry, curiosity and forgetfulness. No doubt a browser and a digital image archive can do many things to keep the past on life support, but they will never succeed in looking quite so human as a boot-scraped scrap of paper does, drifting across the windswept surface of the dustbin of history toward the quite victory of sheer persistence."