My main fascination as an artist lies in examining the ways cities erase and build over themselves. I am interested in the differences between the stories that communities choose to remember and the uncomfortable facts that are swept under the rug to be intentionally forgotten. My go-to move is to find an old photograph of a much changed site, then use visual clues and old maps to find the exact spot where a long-ago photographer planted their tripod. The rephotograph that results creates a visual rip in time — a photographic time portal collapsing historical periods.

The tradition of rephotography was pioneered in the 1970’s, when Mark Klett’s Rephotographic Survey Project revisited 19th-century U.S. government surveys by photographers Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson to create a dialogue between past and present landscapes, suggesting the curdling effect of manifest destiny on the Western landscape. In the 1990’s, Shimon Attie projected scenes of pre-Holocaust photographs of Berlin onto the same street blocks where the photos were originally taken, creating flickering visions of the Jewish community that had been erased from these scenes.

Now that I have taken up the baton of the rephotography tradition in an era of augmented reality, I often leave A/R codes on stickers or street signs at scenes where I choose to create a rip in visual time. A curious passerby who scans the QR code sees a time portal through their phone and discover that a spot they might have walked past thousands of times played a pivotal — sometimes frightening, sometimes inspiring -- role in the history of their city.