In his project “A Spring in New York”, French photographer Frédéric Lebain imposes urban landscape upon itself in a contemporary nod to the surrealist concepts of altered perspective and irrational collage.

My question is, how long did he wait between exposures? Some of the prints look much more or much less weathered, more or less aged than their counterparts in the second photo, or in varying times of year. But it’s tough to tell whether that is a result of the artists delayed method, or the constantly changing environment of the city. In some places in New York, a scene could remain unchanged for years at a time, while others are in flux on an hourly basis…

Either way, cool project.

I would love to see these photos of photos printed, and back in the scenes again for a third exposure — and a fourth, and a fifth, etc… — gradually zooming out in scope, eventually to reveal the entire city from these specific lines of sight with successive incremental frames of view through time.

Maybe something similar actually happens with our real memory of someplace: older images and perceptions may be subconsciously overlaid onto the real place, somehow inset and attached to the scene. Yet that reality itself becomes yet another memory on the next visit, and repeated to the point where that place exists at so many scales in our mind that it forms a pastiche which comprises all that we know about the place.