In 2019, artist David Horvitz began deleting digital photographs from his personal archive. Taken on various digital cameras since the early 2000s, images were retrieved from various computers, hard drives, and memory cards, then erased as a means to respond to a culture oversaturated with digital imagery carried by eroded attention spans. This erasure became an artwork: “Nostalgia”—a digital projection that allows a photograph to “live” for one minute only. For example, in 2019 at La Criée centre d’art contemporain in Rennes, France, “Nostalgia” consisted of 19,080 digital photographs projected for a total duration of 19,080 minutes. If no one was present during a photo’s projection, no one would see it. These images became ephemeral like the moments they originally captured.

As a supplement to this artwork, the contents of these images were logged as text descriptions and eventually published in Nostalgia, a book published by Edition Taube and Gato Negro in 2022. Ten passages from this publication are included here courtesy of the artist.