Shimon Attie, Auguststrasse/Ecke Tucholskystrasse, Berlin, 1993

Shimon Attie’s photographs reflect on the relationship between place, memory, and identity. To make the “Writing on the Wall” series to which this work belongs, Attie gathered archival photographs taken before World War II of street life in one of Berlin’s former Jewish quarters. He projected slides enlarging these historical images onto the locations where they were originally made and then photographed the results of his projection at night. The photographs seem to make the invisible visible, giving temporary form to memories and now hidden aspects of a place. They present the past as a flickering apparition in the present. To make this particular photograph, Attie projected a snapshot from 1930 of the Torah Talmud School onto the building it used to occupy at the corner of August and Tucholsky Streets.

Stamp Gallery, 2016