The work of art in the age of digital reproduction is all about the grab. If Hollywood won’t come to Buffalo, the grab will bring Buffalo to Hollywood. The bevy of images on the World Wide Web is open to anyone with access to a computer. An image can be downloaded, reconstructed, and mixed with any other image. Hollywood special effects meet Buffalo’s abandoned buildings. Which is the more spectacular?

A passenger riding on the bus to a given destination must face forward. The buildings which mark a city’s surface fly by like film frames. Above the windows on the bus is a place for photographs. A window provides a frame from which one can be both observer and observed. Two people in an exact moment will not have the same experience. History and myth face each other in opposition: history absorbed with its own self-importance admonishes us that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it while myth warns always to look ahead. Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt when she took one last look at the city she was forced to flee. Orpheus condemned Eurydice forever to the underworld by not heeding directions and looking back at his love before reaching the above ground. A landscape peppered with unused buildings is a city’s memory. Those buildings that have been destroyed are a city’s myth. To look back can be to look forward. A ruin is already a photograph in a collective memory.