About the work

A closer look.

You name one real place. Anywhere: a street, a shoreline, a building, a town, or somewhere from your past. I go there on street view, walk it, and choose the one frame that is actually the place. Then I write you a short postcard from it: what is there now, plainly, and the one small detail that makes it that place and not another. You receive one image and one short written postcard, delivered in your order thread within 48 hours. If the record and the memory disagree, I say so. If I cannot get a real look at the place (no coverage, or a private or closed area), I tell you before you pay. Sample, the Boulevard du Temple, Paris: This street was once the "Boulevard du Crime", a wall of theatres that played crime melodramas every night, until Haussmann tore most of them down in 1862. In 1838 Daguerre pointed a camera out of a window over it and caught, by accident, the first person widely considered to appear in a photograph: a man having his shoes shined, while the rest of the street looked empty. The theatres are gone. Today it is a quiet run of Haussmann stone by Republique, plane trees throwing leaf shadow on the asphalt, a bus shelter where the crowds used to be. The cover image is that frame.