A Photograph: New York Skyline. 1998.

About the Photograph

New York Skyline from Liberty Park New Jersey. 1998

Here is a excerpt from my 2005 book Stephen Johnson On Digital Photography telling the story: of this photograph.

Most of us make far more photographs than we ever print, and file away far more than we ever look at again. In 1998, we decided we were going to do some panoramics around New York City to display at the Photo District News conference, PhotoPlus. One of the places I always thought would be cool to do a panoramic would be looking back toward lower Manhattan from Liberty State Park in New Jersey. With the help of my friends George Moss and Pete Sucy, we toughed out a very windy day and made the photograph. I created a panoramic QTVR (virtual reality) file for the PDN website in a car on the way back to the Javitts Center, then filed the image away.

Then came September 2001. We were all consumed by the attacks at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on the hijacked aircraft over Pennsylvania on September 11. After keeping the kids home from school, I did go ahead and go in to work for a couple of hours. I noticed my website was down and I couldn’t figure out what was going on; I couldn’t get it back online. I called the host and they said I was way over my data transfer quota, that I would have to up my quota because suddenly my site was being hit by the tens of thousands. As it turns out it was because I had this panoramic that included the World Trade Center right at the heart of the photograph. We upped the quota and I modified the page. I started looking for the full-resolution file. I found the preview that I had made the VR from rather quickly, a small 750x2000 pixel 20MB file. I made a panoramic print which was kind of fuzzy because, of course, I made it big. I cried. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

The Seybold show was coming up in San Francsico, and we had a gallery in it. We talked about this quite a bit, whether we should do a print of this New York skyline with towers rising tall for that gallery. At first I couldn’t even find the full res file and started to believe it may have been lost. Eventually, I found it on a DAT tape in a stack marked “Tapes to be indexed.” It simply had not been indexed. I opened the file, and it turned out it was around 600MB. As we all looked at the image, then made a big print, my staff and I all cried some more. I decided to show it at Seybold, even though it had nothing to do with the photographs I was making. Everybody that came in my gallery and saw that print said it was important to see it. One of the very reasons that I started using that digital scanning camera was for the extraordinary detail, and this became one of the reasons that this particular photograph was unimaginable not to show. The detail was such that you could easily see the people on the top of the towers on the tourist deck.

We made a 20-foot-long print on faith that it was sort of a step in the direction of never forgetting and put it up in the show. There were a lot of tears and a lot of good discussions about it at the show. It turned out to be a bit cathartic and something of a gathering point of grief. That print did something to my notion of what these panoramics and these high-resolution images can do. It once again redefined for me the nature of what photography can be. We all have known that it is a powerful tool for recording time, for holding memories, for holding some sense of who people were and what they were like. But to now do it with the fidelity that is unparalleled in the history of photography takes it into yet another realm in the history of humans recording the world. The panoramics have come to mean even more to me now.