Private Story
Two Years' Time
Two Years' Time
Google the town of Lititz--“Coolest Small Town in America” is what you will find. This small, South East Pennsylvania town was voted as the coolest little town in America in 2013. The town has a history rooted in the Moravian Church, and manufacturing beer, chocolate, and pretzels. Now it is marketed as a hip town with upscale condos and farm to table restaurants. Two Years’ Time centers around the reconstruction of this community, and acts as a conversation with time.
Although Lititz Pennsylvania acts as the backdrop for this project, the images and video are addressing problems that are relatable to any location within the United States. Water pollution, gentrification, and deteriorating infrastructure are all very real problems that are largely being left unaddressed. By utilizing this small town, it allows for these big conversations to have very concise specific examples.
You can see how time has taken its toll on the town: a field that was once paved away to make room for a fifty-five and up community is now populated with homes, train tracks that cut their way through the center of town have now been left to rust, and the once quiet mainstreet is now bustling with excitement. The photographs, taken in 2018, and the video, made in 2020, are attempting to have a conversation with each other about gentrification, preservation, and societal choices. What happens when the things that made this town “cool” to the inhabitants originally, start to fade away and are knocked down to make way for a more tourist friendly environment?
In a short timespan of two years, there have been many changes, not just in Lititz Pennsylvania, but in the country as a whole. Lititz acts as a microcosm for the larger outstanding problems that our country still has yet to deal with.
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