Gymnasium Chases Portfolio is part of Christian Boltanski’s reflection on memory, loss, and the passage of time. Inspired by a found photograph of the 1931 graduating class from a Jewish high school in Vienna, the series isolates and enlarges the faces of the students, creating haunting portraits that balance individual identity with universal significance.

The soft-focus images, nearly reduced to silhouettes, evoke the collective memory of a generation lost to history. Boltanski’s work meditates on the fragility of memory and the absence of those who perished in the Holocaust, exploring how their memory endures and how we reckon with the absence of the dead.