A Walk Through Gilded New York — Gilded Age re-photography project

The Gilded Age in New York City, much like contemporary New York, was full of opulence, power, and wealth. A Walk Through Gilded New York is a mobile app I worked on with the Museum of the City of New York. We visited 16 key locations throughout New York City, and I rephotographed them, doing my best to match the angle and perspective of the archival images.

Download the app A Walk Through Gilded New York from the Apple Store or Google Play, and you’ll learn about how the famous families such as the Astors, Carnegies, the Fricks and the Vanderbilts held lavish parties, financed iconic buildings and mansions and founded cultural institutions. Some of the structures are long gone, but most are among the treasures of New York City architecture that make the city a vibrant place to explore. In addition to the app, you can view all of my images here or click on the locations below.

I chose to capture all of the images digitally with a tilt shift lens mounted onto my Nikon. Then in post, I worked to warp the images over the vintage photographs to match the perspective and angle more closely. 

It's fascinating to see all the differences in the city but also how so much would be recognizable to a person of that era. It's precisely this layering of histories that makes the experience of walking in a city like New York so pleasurable. In spending so much time with each location, it was great to slow down and notice the differences all the while imagining the photographers of that era lugging around their large cameras, setting them up and making the pictures. 

Actress Grace Gummer narrates the tour. The app curated and written by Jessica Lautin and produced by Acoustiguide for the Museum of the City of New York.

The Siegel-Cooper department store

The Metropolitan Club

Cornelius Vanderbilt II Mansion

James B. Duke House

The Metropolitan Museum

William K. Vanderbilt Mansion

Mrs. William B. Astor House

Metropolitan Opera House

Waldorf Astoria

The Plaza Hotel

Andrew Carnegie Mansion

JP Morgan House

Henry Clay Frick House

Felix Warburg Mansion

Lord and Taylor

Tiffany & Co., Union Square Flagship Store

Cycles of the new and the old, part 2

This post was cross-posted in The Camera Club of New York's Blog.

The Carleton Watkins stereograph was taken around the time of the founding of the Camera Club in 1884. Watkins' journey to the falls was arduous. He and his assistants were literally carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment.

I have been thinking a lot about the journey it took to produce a picture and where technology stands today. The iPhone 4S is a game changer. It has me thinking about photography and meaning in our contemporary life. Many current smartphones are shooting images as big as 8 megapixels and above. This gives the public access to pocketable cameras that are now approaching 35 mm film in terms of resolvable detail.

As mentioned in my previous post, the iPhone 4S and the handful of other new phone cameras are shifting photography the same way that the Kodak Brownie did in the past. The Brownie pushed photography from a niche specialty into a popular pastime. Now the iPhone has pushed photography from a popular pastime to something more akin to breathing, eating and memory. What did you do today? Here is a picture on my phone. What did you eat today? Here is another picture. Whenever you attend an event, the scrum of people in front of you are no longer are holding a lighter. Many are holding up their phones.

I bring up the Upper Yosemite image partly because of the fantastic difference in degree of difficulty in attaining an image, but also because Apple's iPhone page seems to be referencing this historic tradition.

Now take a closer look at the image in the lower right:

This is nearly the identical view of Upper Yosemite that Ansel Adams was shooting, along with Carleton Watkins before him.

I don't think Apple's awareness of the history of photography is any accident. Like it or not, these devices are the new normal camera for amateurs and professionals alike. With these new devices come a host of new features and new questions for the medium.

Not only are phones and cameras fixed together, but they are attached to a GPS. As long as the device attaches location data, a permeant record of the photographer's location will be left for historians and writers to think about when discussing that image. Apple was kind enough to share this data with the image above so we know that the photographer for their Upper Yosemite photo was at:

37 44.64N 119 35.51W

I imagine this spot isn't too far from where Watkins stood to make this image below.

Yosemite Falls, photographed by Carleton E. Watkins, 1861.

I was curious how much the iPhone image could resemble this Watkins. So, I opened up Apple's iPhone Jpeg in Photoshop and in a few minutes I made the Apple image into this.

Not exactly there, but close enough for this example–the iPhone is not simply a contemporary Kodak Brownie with bells and whistles, but a machine that continually manufactures photographic simulacra. As anyone who had used any number of iPhone apps such as instagram or Hipstamatic, one of the adictivly fun features of this new technology is the ability to instantly transform any picture into a simulacrum of a process of the past. Think that picture looks good in black and white--similar to Illford XP2? Maybe you're unfamiliar with an Illford XP2. Who cares? It looks great, right?

Take a look at this 1000 memories Real world instagram guide below and their post:

With or without a guide like this (which most users will never see) what does it mean to use a filter on your images? And, for that matter, what does it mean to be producing images in traditional processes (when the simulation is now what many think of as the original)? In this era of people mistaking theme parks for real life, we are being removed from the original. There will have to be new ways of explaining this to the future generations to make sure we don't also remove originality as well.

Communication Arts - 2011 Interactive Annual - The World Park

I’m super excited, The World Park, a project I worked on last Summer was recently recognized in Communication Arts - 2011 Interactive Annual. It was a blast to work on read all about it below.

From CA:

Overview: Today, young people spend less time enjoying urban parks and more time being entertained by the Internet and digital devices. When New York City’s Central Park wanted to engage a younger, more wired visitor, it created this outdoor mobile museum, offering an alternative way for tourists to interact with this iconic landmark. With mobile devices as the means for reinventing the park experience, visitors interact with the park by scanning Parkodes, custom QR-Codes that resemble digital trees. Each code revealed a question relating to the visitor’s exact location, turning the park into an interactive board game. Visitors unlock park secrets, famous movie scenes, views from the 1800s, and even hunted for a real-world Shakespeare in the park.

• The project required seven months of planning, research, writing and content creation; it contains more than 120 HTML interfaces with custom CSS for almost any Web-enabled device.
• An awareness campaign included interactive ads and TV spots using actual consumer generated media and ten park animals were used as event “spokespeople” on Facebook.
• The first World Park event opened to the public on Arbor Day weekend 2010. Over 1,500 participants used their mobile phones to scan more than 50 codes placed throughout the park.

Comments by Michael Ferrare

How did this project compare with others you’ve worked on in the past? “World Park was a rare opportunity created by our agency. We had just started Agency Magma in New York and wanted to do some-thing that lived up to our mission to be an integrated idea agency that solves problems by creating experiences—not just advertising. We created the concept and built a demo, then we showed it to the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation and they were excited to test the idea. The design of the Parkodes was a really important step for us. We believe that great design makes change easier, so we challenged ourselves to introduce a new technology, like QR-Codes, in a proprietary and memorable way. The World Park isn’t a one-time event, it’s a product, a piece of intellectual property, a new event plat-form for brands to co-sponsor. It gives Central Park a new way to present itself in today’s marketplace; it also proves that we’re a next-generation idea agency.”

Credits

Undoboy/Jamie Victor, senior designers Kim Bartkowski/Will Thomsen, creative directors Michael Ferrare, executive creative director Connie Finkelman, senior developer Harlan Erskine/Josh Feuhner, photographers PHILLYK, director Adam Larossa, sound designer Jeremy Brown, integrated producer Ian Stout, retoucher Kristian Summerer, consultant Michael Obrien, fabricator Agency Magma (New York, NY), project design and development NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, client