Show and Tell is an occasional recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption, with most of the entries contributed by the site’s readers. Today’s installment is by a reader who prefers to be known simply as Steve. You can see additional Show and Tell posts here. — Paul
By Steve
Paul’s recent post about the artist Yuji Agematsu, who collects little scraps of detritus and arranges them into calendar-based displays, reminded me of a personal project I undertook about 15 years ago.
I had just moved into a new apartment in a new city and was about to turn 30. In part because I was thinking about those life transitions of time and place, and in part to scratch some sort of creative itch, I decided to visit all the homes where I’d previously lived (they’re clustered in two separate metropolitan areas that I visited over the course of about a week). I took photos of their house numbers and then used a website that generates photo grids to create a kind of photographic-geographic infographic, with each square representing a year that I lived at a given address — an address-based record of the first 30 years of my life:
