In his work, Boltanski presents people or objects that are dead and forgotten. Usually there are lots of them – there are thousands in this work – and reflect the mass numbers related to the Holocaust. He says: What drives me as an artist is that I think everyone is unique, yet everyone disappears so quickly. I made a large work called The Reserve of Dead Swiss (1990) and all the people in photographs in the work are dead. We hate to see the dead, yet we love them, we appreciate them. Human. That’s all we can say. Everyone is unique and important.