ECHOES
ECHOES portrays people who have become part of our public memory, and meets them again in the present.
What it is about
ECHOES is an ongoing portrait project by pete john. It asks what remains when public attention shifts — and what that shift has to do with the image we keep of a person.
Those portrayed come from sport, music, film and television, from politics, culture and science, from the internet and from fields that have no settled name. What they share is that, at a certain time, they were part of what many people knew about at once.
Attention and memory
Public attention changes. The person remains.
Attention is not a property of a person but a state of the public. It shifts for many reasons: because a career ends as planned, because someone decides to step out of the light, because another path becomes more important, because a new generation produces images of its own.
Memory does not follow that shift. It stays attached to a person, to a moment, to an image — often across decades and across generations.
Role models
Some of these people were role models and have remained so. Others were idols or figures of identification; others again were part of an evening that many experienced at the same time. Some came to embody an era without ever intending to.
ECHOES does not set these forms against one another and does not rank them. There is no hierarchy and there are no categories in this project.
Meeting in the present
ECHOES meets these people in the present. Not to set a then against a now, but to make a portrait in which both are present: the public image, the memory of it, and the person standing in front of the camera today.
The artistic form is open. It develops with the project and with each encounter.
An ongoing project
ECHOES has no fixed number of encounters and no fixed end. It grows over years. Each encounter stands on its own and belongs to all the others at the same time.
Does someone come to mind when you read this?
Then share ECHOES directly with that person.
You pass no data whatsoever to pete john: no name, no address, no number. The person decides for themselves whether to get in touch.
The link leads to a page written for them — not to this project description.
The person behind it
ECHOES is an art project by pete john, a conceptual artist with artistic roots in New York and Cologne. Since the 1990s his work has focused on people, images and the question of how we construct reality.
He reviews every contact request himself. There is no agency and no team in between.
