Although the audience is not privy to the source material, post-war European imagery often dominates. Adolphs is exploring and re-picturing the period in which photography was becoming truly accessible and widespread for the first time. From the 1950s onward in particular, Europeans were becoming amateur photographers, documenting civil and domestic life. This was happening concurrently to mass migration and rebuilding, a return to normalcy which was also the beginning of something entirely new. This period, known as the ‘great acceleration’, in human population, industrialisation, carbon emissions, was, among many other things, also a great acceleration in our ability to document and capture, to reproduce the world infinitely, with gusto and fidelity.

This process of capture is a powerful relational force, one may lay claim to an unreal past, fill in gaps and rewrite history, it can also provide a sense of security in unfamiliar spaces. In the post-war context, the evolution of photography paralleled the rise of modern tourism, as large numbers of people began to travel outside their habitual environments and pose before or simply document foreign landscapes. Photographic images like these provide most of the knowledge we have about the look of the past.

Adolphs’ passion for collecting was ignited by the extensive family albums cherished by her parents, which contained images of relatives. From a young age Clara found herself transfixed by the Germans and Latvians who populate the albums, individuals she had not met but about whom she harboured a profound curiosity. This is a common experience in the children of migrants, as they often maintain a meaningful connection to a culture despite geographic and even temporal distance.

As Susan Sontag highlighted, the majority of people who make photographs do not do so as artists. Instead, they document in an effort to preserve memories, to stem the flow of time, as form of personal insurance against what has passed. These are not art forms, but traces of history. Adolphs’ work and intention, as a contemporary observer and collector, is to transforms these ordinary moments into art. That is the sorcery of the artist, breathing new life into faded prints, families or hiking groups who stood on the sides of mountains and lakes. Adolphs often focuses on subjects who engage with the camera, staring down the lens, they manage to look back, an effect of intensity and depth. By creating paintings, she elevates her subjects into a new context, shifting their representation from private into a public arena.