Shimon Attie
[Photographer, b. 1957, Los Angeles, lives in New York.]

 I use contemporary media to reanimate sites and places with images of their own lost histories. 
 I think of my work as a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath. 
 Simply because something is not visible it doesn’t mean that it is not there. 
 There’s this presence of these missing people and this lost community that I felt but could not see, and that was a very strange dissonance for me. 
 My intention is to create opportunities for reflections and meditations on history. 
 I use images as signifiers that point to layers of history, lost communities or a latent collective whispering within a certain context. 
 … my boundaries between past, present and future are perhaps more porous than other people’s. I think the same is true about text and image. Text is an image for me; when I use it visually I insist on it having the right quality. Words are images.