Erinnerungsstücke / Mementos

What do we hold in our hearts? How can a mundane everyday item become a beloved object? In “Erinnerungsstücke / Mementos”, Hamburg-based photographer Nanine Renninger explores the mysteries of memories. For this project, she created visual and written portraits of 44 individuals together with their favorite items. In highly personal and often surprising stories, they explain how these items found their way to them—and why they remained—from Grandpa’s dressing gown to the neighbour’s bike, an album filled with poems and notes from friends to a stove side bench, from a coffee cup to their first radio. Erinnerungsstücke / Mementos invites the reader to flick through the pages and explore, to delve into life stories and contemplate: which of our memories remain; which do we let go? The stories are accompanied by scientific observations from the fields of neurology and psychology that trace the threads of memory and explain why it is that some things accompany us for an entire lifetime.

Text in English and German.