In 1991 I was asked by the Oklahoma City Art Museum to undertake a project that reflected the history of the city through its photographic representation. I chose to work with some of the earliest photographs of the city and contrast them with rephotographs made at the same locations. The work was published as Photographing Oklahoma 1889/1991 (Oklahoma City Art Museum/Portfolio Editions) and also exhibited at the Art Museum the same year. 

I wrote for the book:

Partly due to the project’s time restraints, but mainly by choice, I decided to make photographs in response to the earliest pictures I could find of Oklahoma City. As rephotographs they are not precise – exact duplication of the originals would have been impossible. But as companions to early images, I hope they convey this land’s startling transformation from a collection of tents to a modern city. There are many stages of this transformation which are not apparent here; we see only the beginning and the most recent manifestations of change.

The land rush of 1889 was the underlying history of the project. The land rush began on the morning of April 22, 1889, when some 50,000 people lined up along designated borders to claim for free what had been deemed “Unassigned Lands.” In fact, Oklahoma City started almost instantly on lands taken from Native Americans. Almost one hundred and six years later, in what could never have been imagined in 1991, the city was the site of another, tragic, history. On April 19, 1995, domestic terrorists used a truck bomb to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killing 167 people and injuring 684 others.

The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building can be seen spanning panels 7 and 8 from left of the panorama.