Nostalgia is an ongoing artwork started in 2019 that takes the form of deleting digital photographs from my personal archive. These photographs have been made on various digital cameras since the early 2000’s and stored on computers, hard drives and memory cards. Their subjects are diverse: ranging from personal moments, to visual note- taking as a mnemonic device, to photos used in artworks. (And some I just don’t remember or know why I made them, maybe from a drunken blur.)

When exhibited the artwork is presented as a digital projection. The photographs are exhibited once for one minute and then deleted. The number of projected (and deleted) images equal the number in minutes an exhibition is open. 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 is in the exhibition at the moment a photograph is projected, no one sees it.

(The photographs become ephemeral like the moments they originally capture.)

The photographs from this book were presented and deleted between 17 October 2022 and 21 January 2023 in David Horvitz’s exhibition at Jean-Kenta Gauthier gallery in Paris. In total 16,380 digital images were projected and deleted. The exhibition was open for 16,380 minutes.

Metadata indicating time and date are presented along with memories of the photographs. If the camera was not set or if there was a malfunction, that data might not re ect the actual time of the moment of the photograph.

—David Horvitz