German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann began presenting photographic collections in the form of small picture books in the late '60s. Each contained a number of black-and-white photographs of a particular subject &ndassh; 14 mountains, 12 views of aircraft in the sky, 11 sets of women's knees, six pictures of football players – and each was titled accordingly. These collections of bland photographs of mundane subjects reflected his relentless cataloguing of the environment. By selecting such limited subject matter, he attempted to present the world in a knowable, commodified form.
A fine example is Das kleine Mövenbuch (The Little Seagull Book), containing 152 images of seagulls taken whilst on a trip to Scotland. The outcome of this obsessive repetition is that Feldmann's images manage to summarize the specific, turning it into the generic – a single seagull representing all seagulls.
