One Thousand and Seventy-eight Blue Skies by Belgian artist Anton Kusters was created between 2012 and 2017 across Europe. The project consists of 1,078 instant photographs capturing the blue sky above the last known locations of former Nazi concentration camps and killing centers.
The work engages with enduring questions about how societies remember traumatic events and how collective memory evolves as time distances us from the original trauma. Fundamentally, it examines the challenges of representing the scale and impact of mass atrocity. Kusters juxtaposes the abstract simplicity of a blue sky with precise data—GPS coordinates and estimated victim numbers—blind-stamped onto each image. The project emphasizes the fading nature of historical consciousness through the use of chemically unstable instant film, whose color will inevitably degrade, echoing the waning of collective memory.
Visually, the photographs are uniformly composed: upward-facing shots of the sky taken with a cheap plastic camera using peel-apart Fujifilm FP 100-C instant film. Clouds, slight shifts in hue, and occasional visual anomalies individualize each frame. The images are highly reflective, causing viewers to see themselves in the surface—a metaphorical device that implicates them in the act of remembrance.
Critically acclaimed, the project was a finalist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and is held in major museum collections. Exhibiting the original fading photographs presents institutions with a curatorial decision about the act of conservation itself, a challenge requested by the artist that mirrors the broader struggle to preserve and present the memory of trauma.
