His earliest works, mostly films and photographs in a documentary style, focused on remembrances of his own childhood and cleverly mixed fictional characters in with real ones. During the 1980s, he became famous for projects that used portrait photographs of Jewish schoolchildren and piles of worn clothing to evoke the death camps of the Holocaust. His monumental installation No Man's Land, in which 30 tons of discarded clothing were sifted by a giant mechanical claw and accompanied by the sound of recorded human heartbeats, was installed in 2010 at the Park Avenue Armory.