time portals
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.
Time Portal: Over Five Points Atlanta Trivision Billboard (2026)
Documentation at Swan Coach House Gallery Field Notes exhibition
I found an 1895 carte-de-visite made about 800 feet away from Atlanta’s “zero mile post” which marked the founding spot of the city in 1837, and directly over the site of Jacobs’ Pharmacy where Coca-Cola was first served in 1886. A now unknown photographer made the view from the rooftop of the now-demolished original Equitable Building in Atlanta’s Five Points. To capture the same viewpoint, I had to figure out the rooftop height of that long-gone building, and fly a drone camera to that elevation. The alignment of my 2025 photograph with the 1895 postcard is almost perfect, yet there is almost no architectural legacy left from the original scene, so I have paired the two photographs with a map so the viewer can orient themselves. Making the images rotate in the style of a 1950’s trivision billboard came to me when I was commissioned to create a 40 foot long immersive hallway for Hambidge Hive in 2025. I created a zigzag in the style of a tabula scalata, an illusion dating from the 16th century in which an image is painted on two faces of a zigzag frame so that the picture seems to change from one image to another while walking past it. I was happy/not happy with the result. I liked the idea of activating an installation with the viewer’s own participation. But I wondered if a tabula scalata could reveal itself, and remembered vaguely that in the 1950s there were “trivision” billboards on the highways that rotated ads on prisms, the first “digital display” in history. It took me six months of feverish work to figure out how to make the 12 motors work in sync, and designing and fabricating the massive intricate plywood cabinet it is housed in turned out to be one of the most fiendishly difficult technical challenges of my studio career.
Time Portal: Over Five Points Atlanta, 1895 and 2024, north view (2024)
00:40 sec looping one-channel video
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.
Time Portal: Over Five Points Atlanta, 1895 and 2024, Northwest View (2024)
00:40 sec looping one-channel video
Most Atlantans know the famous Cyclorama Civil War painting “The Battle of Atlanta” (1885). It is the largest painting in the world, mounted as a giant cylinder at The Atlanta History Center. Unfurled it would be 358 feet long. But few people realize the vantage point where the Cyclorama was sketched from photographs by the American Panorama Company was from an elevated platform near Little Five Points in Atlanta (33°45'35.868"N 84°21'0.061"W). I tracked down the exact vantage point of the original and rephotographed the painting from a drone camera using 100 overlapping images. Stitched together into a panoramic mural, my photograph makes a complete 360º cylinder like the original, and is 36 feet long, 1:10 scale of the massive original.
Time Portal: Atlanta Cyclorama Redux (2023)
36”x312” panoramic mural photograph by Joel Silverman
Original painting
The Battle of Atlanta (“Atlanta Cyclorama”), 1885
Atlanta History Center
I had to puzzle over old maps for weeks to figure out that Civil War photographer George N. Barnard’s 1864 photograph Atlanta, Ga. Civilians crowded on tops of boxcars at railroad depot fleeing the Union Army was in fact the Five Points MARTA station at the center of Downtown Atlanta. I teach a college history of photography class a block from this site, and led my class on a scavenger hunt to find this site with me. Almost all of us had ridden in that morning to this very station.
Time Portal: Atlanta Five Points I (2025)
00:40 sec looping one-channel video