History appears in Thomas Demand’s work as an unstable image: familiar, mediated, reconstructed, and never entirely reliable.

The Stutter of History accompanies a major touring exhibition and surveys key works from across Demand’s career. His practice begins with images already circulating in the public sphere — press photographs, media fragments, political scenes, or sites connected to historical events. Demand reconstructs these images as life-size paper models, photographs them, and then destroys the models. The final photograph therefore shows neither the original event nor a conventional document, but a carefully staged reconstruction of an image that has already shaped collective memory.

The book examines how historical events are consumed through images and how photography can both preserve and destabilize what it appears to record. Demand’s works address the distance between event, model, photograph, and memory, making visible the gaps, omissions, and distortions through which history is mediated.

Alongside extensive reproductions of Demand’s works, the volume includes a short story by Ali Smith written in response to one of his images, as well as essays by Douglas Fogle, curator of the exhibition, and Margaret Iversen. Together, these contributions situate Demand’s practice within broader questions of representation, historical consciousness, media culture, and the constructed nature of photographic truth.