The word cliché is of French origin and can refer to more than a printing plate or a preconception, for instance also to a photo negative, a print and the act of taking a picture. Inga Kerber makes use of this semantic variety with a condensed overview of her archives, organised according to classic, clichéd image categories: landscape, still life, portrait, nude. The artist choses subjects, scans the originals, prints them and arranges them into series. Shifts of colour or small flaws that appear in the process of reproduction are not retouched, but rather acknowledged as a quality in themselves. Cliché is a book that sees reproducibility as an essential mode of images: their circulation leaves traces, in our memories as well as in the images themselves.
