The Past is a Foriegn Country L.P. Hartly

I have been collecting before and after images of Houston for the past five years. My mother started a ritual of shooting street scenes and “Mom and Pop Shops” in the 1970’s, I stole the idea in the 1980’s and continue the process today.

While working through this ever growing, dense, almost getting boring collection, I wondered how can I simplify this? What else can these images represent? How can they tell a story in a thought-provoking, but easy, straightforward way?

First, I broke the images down into categories. Each category represents all the things we seek as we roam this earth. Some are interchangeable, others  generational and a few stay the same.

i.e.

The Record Exchange was a shop, but at some point, it was a house where someone lived. Today the lot is a complex where lots of people live.

The Variety Fair was a place you could buy anything you could possibly want, and today its a place to buy everything you could want but nothing we need. 

Antioch is still Antioch.


Here are examples of the seven categories I started out with:

1) Homes / Dwellings. "We all need a crib",  Mike Hollis 


2) Places of Worship. Many attend, some don't, others believe.


3) Education. We learn and attend schools at all levels.


4) Stores/Shopping. We love stuff, but its never enough.


5) Money/Jobs/Occupations. We work to buy stuff.


6) Restaurants/Bars We like to be served and for people to watch us eat.


7) Legacies / Families / Friends. We all have pursuits.


Later I realized I could siphon it down even more to three categories:

1) The Past

2) The Present


3) The Future

Then I started playing around with the images adding my favorite movie clips and screenshots on the topic of time. I started making “timecards” which reminded me how so many of live an institutional life, working by someone else’s clock.

In the heat of my “timecard_period,” a friend invited me to join on a trip to Dubai, and I jumped at the chance.

There I visited “The Frame” symbolizing the past, present and future of the U.A.E. and learned that Dubai was an oil rich block of sand for three decades but dried out in 1990. The leaders of the city took it in stride and decided to re-imagine it all, rapidly developing it to be a tourist destination like no other, proving that the world doesn’t need their oil. What the world needs now is to stop, smell the roses, and savor the beauty in the world.