Street View for the Historical Society 28 December 2008
I was walking the dog around my the block at my grandma’s house and started thinking that genre of historical cityscape photos that you’d find at a city or state’s historical society. I find it absolutely fascinating to be able to peer into a snapshot of a place and time. It’s both exciting and a bit scary to think how new technologies/databases like Google’s Street View will probably be this period’s equivalent. The exciting part is that the record would be exponentially more complete but the scary part is how fragile it is. You can’t just drop a server off at the Historical Society and wish them well… even if you could it’s hard to believe that any computerized record is going to last longer than silver based negatives and prints.
That then got pondering the possibility of using the modern techniques to record a city in the older, more stable medium of film. I don’t see any way of making it commercially viable so framing it as an art project and looking for a grant would probably be the only way of funding it. Since it’d be an artistic undertaking I’d want the purity of capturing the image directly onto film rather than storing them digitally and then printing an analog image.
Having properly geo-coding images would be the entire point of the project so it would be critical to record the time and location that each image was taken. This would, in turn, require some custom (or customized) cameras. I’d want to use the same type of imprinting technology that records the date and time on a negative to also store the latitude and longitude–even cooler would be to record the approximate address. Rather than constantly changing film it seems logical to use the 1000 foot rolls of 35mm film that you’d find in a movie camera. The final component would be a computer and GPS to control the camera and provide the location.
The really interesting part that I haven’t yet given any thought to would be figuring out how to present the images.
But I’ll file this under things I’d love to do but will never have the time for.
Update: Sepia Town seems like a really cool, related project.