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The artist Elisheva Biernoff finds photographs that have been thrown away in thrift store bins or on eBay (where she got this one). She pays a few dollars for them, brings them back to her studio, and goes to work.
Seven hours a day, as she hunches over her drawing table, her eyes scan the original. She preps thin painted plywood, sized to match the original photograph. Scroll back and forth between these last few moments and you can see it happen: the additional detail added in reflections on the table, or the subtle shifts in color on each individual surface of the cards. The bright whites are tamped down; everything is brought more in line with the muted tone of the overall image.
“What I’m doing is sticking with it,” Ms. Biernoff said. “The main ingredient in my paintings is time.” This image that you spent time with took her about three months to finish.
In an age when it often seems faster and bigger and more is better, “my work definitely is kind of stubbornly going in the opposite direction,” she told me. “What happens when you go really small? What happens when you spend a lot of time? What happens when you sort of lavish attention on one humble, easily dismissed thing?”
She also paints the back stains, yellowing at the edges, Kodak labels, date stamps, or handwriting (if there is any). With this, they become more than just a flat painting, but a kind of sculptural object that carries an inherent tension: It looks just like the original, but it isn’t.
There’s joy in this tension; your brain breaks a little bit with this trick of perception. “Wait. What am I looking at?”
It happened to me in January when I saw Ms. Biernoff’s paintings at the David Zwirner gallery in Manhattan. Then I saw other people casually stroll through the rooms, glancing around, until having their own “wait, what?” moment—jaws dropping as they leaned in closer.
For this image (which isn’t in the current show), Ms. Biernoff was captivated not just by the young man on the front, but also by the message scrawled on the back:
Me / Wish I was Home
She’s painted this handwriting, the yellowing Kodak paper, and the staining on the edges. The colors have dimmed, and the photo is no longer with its original owner—the memory, in a way, is “being forgotten, fading from consciousness,” she said.
The process, with blue painter’s tape around the edges to keep the borders crisp, unfolds here:
Our relationship with images has changed with the internet and digital photography. Many of us fall into an endless sea of images on social media as soon as we wake up, sometimes spending fractions of a second with them.
Ms. Biernoff’s work challenges us to discover (or rediscover) a different way to look at things. (She’s decidedly not on Instagram.) She picks a few pictures and spends months with them. She chooses photos of people she feels a kinship with.
This one reminded her of her grandfather. Here she was drawn to the man’s protective stance, the boys’ squinting against the sun, and the blaze of orange that fills the scene:
These original photos were from an era when every image felt more permanent. Even so, they ended up at the thrift store. She’s pulled them out of the dollar bin and painstakingly reinvested in them.
“I think of my grandparents’ generation when they had a few photos, and then my parents had albums, so maybe hundreds of photos, and I have thousands of photos and my daughter has tens of thousands of photos,” she said. “And yet, I don’t know what all that extra recording does because it’s hard to review it all, to even see what you’ve got.”
“It’s a lot harder to give weight to any one image when there are so many.”
Elisheva Biernoff: Elsewhere is on view at David Zwirner until Feb. 28.
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/02/01/upshot/10-minute-challenge-biernoff.html