‘Stamp’ & ‘Cushion’

To Be Continued...

Joerg Waehner

A young man steps onto the tram in order to meet his girlfriend. The young man’s name is Joerg Waehner. His girlfriend’s name is Katrin. It is the year 1981. The fact that the Stasi photographed him and filed the reports under the code name ‘Stamp’ – and those of his girlfriend under the name ‘Cushion’ – is something he only learns many years later.
Waehner combined the photographic material, shot through a buttonhole with one of the observers staged as a passer-by, with the corresponding Stasi prose to compose a photographic novella. The ‘wrong’ retouching colours (colour error) in the images frame a reference to the macabre situation of their origin, situated somewhere between youthful ignorance and a state compulsion for control; they offer us an ironic look at the present and at surveillance as an ongoing social continuity.