In 1910 Rudolph De Leeuw published a book of photographs titled “Both Sides of Broadway.” Documenting “every building on Broadway from Bowling Green to Columbus Circle” the book embodies the urge to exhaustively document space, time and place using photography. As with most “complete” typologies the knowledge produced is unwieldy and far exceeds the project’s original aims. This excess of meaning becomes the subject of Matthew Buckingham’s project. Early one winter Sunday morning Buckingham retraced De Leeuw’s steps, walking from Bowling Green to Columbus Circle, re-photographing the same eighty-four blocks of Broadway. But the re-animation is only partial—Buckingham recorded only the East side of the street. In the installation these images are projected as a dissolving sequence of black-and-white slides. Speakers play back sound from the street. One speaker plays back a quiet but compelling voice which addresses the spectator at the same time that it seems to be speaking only to itself. For the spectator the unseen, un-photographed, West side of Broadway somehow becomes the locus of subjectivity for this recorded voice in the installation. As block after block fade in and out of projection the voice speculates on the relation between New York City and the origins and nature of early cinema: the window from which the first motion picture of New York was taken and the architecture of New York’s first purpose-built cinemas. The voice also tells a story about competition among film’s numerous inventors, particularly the Lumiéres and Edison, questioning the radical effect this had on the initial forms that cinema took. This fragmentary history includes an account of the mysterious disappearance of one of these figures, the New York- and London-based Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, arguably the first inventor of cinema. How might the production of moving images have been different if Le Prince had succeeded in patenting his camera before he vanished on a train between Dijon and Paris in 1890? What world events might have been recorded in those five years before Edison and the Lumiéres?