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A discovery made while designing an exhibition reveals surprising parallels with our current moment. Behind the curves and corners of MoMA’s Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented exhibition, mural-sized photographic wallpapers reveal themselves in moments of surprise. These wallpapers contextualize the early-20th-century works of art and design in the exhibition, offering glimpses of the past, inviting us to imagine what it was like to have lived in another place and time and and to envision how the worlds within those photographs shaped the artists whose works are on view. This aspect of the exhibition’s design started out as a small archival photograph, which I scanned to make 100 times or more its original size. All of the scratches and thumbprints become amplified and larger than life, interrupting the viewer’s entry into the image. I digitally retouch these blemishes, working inch by inch in a process that takes days of detailed wor ....