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About this series
“It is very difficult to explain what Horvitz does exactly, and what makes him such an interesting artist. He often jokes how his wife and friends think he is lazy, while actually he is constantly working. You could say that through his work, Horvitz creates a caption for the world rather than a new image for it. Through various conceptual strategies he reflects in a poetic, visual way of how we occupy a place in the world – be it digitally or ‘in real life’,” writes artlead.
Nostalgia by David Horvitz, a photo book without images, is an ongoing artwork about erasure and forgetting which he started in 2019. Since the early 2000s Horvitz captured photos on various digital cameras and stored them on computers, hard drives, and memory cards.
From this archive of photos from the last 20 years, selected files get projected for exactly one minute between 15 October 2022 and 21 January in the Jean-Kenta Gauthier Gallery and then deleted forever.
The book shows 300 of these photos, but not as an image – instead a description of it, written by the artist, combined with the filename and timestamp of the now deleted file.
What is left is the book, and while only a small number of readers will remember the image, the bulk will have a concept of what the image might have looked like. The photographs become ephemeral like the moments they originally captured.
“Nostalgia” is the third edition of the Nostalgia Series. The book is published by Edition Taube (DE/CH) and Gato Negro (MX).
Artist Bio
1982 born David Horvitz is an American artist and graduate from Bard College. He uses different media and distribution methods to spread his ideas: from photography and performance, to books, conceptual websites, online interventions and ‘mail art’. In many of his work, the artist plays with the boundaries of the artwork, with how we receive and read it, and how we ultimately understand it.
Photographer: David Horvitz
Instagram: @davidhorvitz
Photo book: Nostalgia
Photos copyright David Horvitz
DRAWLIGHTS | 1/1 – one post/one photographer, weekly. Off-chain and on-chain. By Peter Nitsch, lens-based artist, a member of Jenny Metaverse and lifetime Member of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.