French artist born in Paris. Boltanski has spent his artistic life working with the most ephemeral of materials - photographs, newspaper clippings, wires, found snapshots, clothing, candles, light bulbs, - to examine and to mark our transitory passing here on earth. Using the photograph as a central image of his work, Boltanski demonstrates its signficance to our understanding, and shows us how the concept of monuments - typically large stone or bronze sculptures whose permanence is an anchor against forgetting the dead - can be subverted yet still hold significant meaning. Boltanski's Les Suisses morts, dealing with the Holocaust, may be even more meaningful because its fragile materials suggest life's fragility and the lost lives of those who have disappeared from the earth through genocide. Through his use of the photograph in these and other works, Boltanski suggests the power of the photograph to produce in us longing, nostalgia, and melancholy for the lives of those pictured, whether we know they perished in a holocaust or not. Selected exhibitions: 1972 "documenta" 5, Kassel, and in 1977. 1973, first exhibition in the US, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1981, retrospective, ARC, Paris, 1984, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986, "Photography as Performance", The Photographers Gallery, London, 1995, Kunsthalle, Vienna, 1995-96, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Compostela.
