Untitled (Ivory Detail on Desk, 1938), from the Freud series

This work comes from a series of black and white charcoal drawings Longo made illustrating details from Sigmund Freud’s apartment in Vienna. They are based on enlarged details in photographs taken by Edmund Engelman before Freud and his family fled the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938. Visually identical to the passages in the photographs but painstakingly hand-drawn in charcoal and graphite, they raise questions about the evidentiary value of photography in documenting history and the role artists play in illustrating it.