The New Museum and scene along the Bowery (4×5 film montage)

I’ve taken a few pictures that include the New Museum as part of my ongoing look at the Bowery at the Lower East Side. But this time I had a specific assignment to photograph the museum, especially as it relates to the immediate neighborhood.

The obvious “best view” of the building from the street is to step back into Prince Street, which terminates perpendicular to the Bowery, to get a little distance from the tower, and show a bit of the street. I’ve also seen a nice evening view from atop a nearby building, and another one from across several rooftops. I’ve done that myself.

But none of the pictures describes very well the way in which the intentionally misaligned stacked boxes mimic horizontally the varying vertical heights of the adjacent buildings. To do this I needed to maintain a frontal “elevation” to the facades from straight across the street. Shooting with a very wide lens didn’t work–too much distortion, and even with perspective correction, not enough of the feeling of a true elevation.

So, I chose to use a medium wide lens on the 4×5 camera, framed horizontally, correcting perspective, and then doing a second frame above the first, this time tilting back to get everything in with plenty of sky to play with later in Photoshop. I repeated the same thing to the right of the museum. In putting the montage together on the computer the upper and lower frames stitched seamlessly pretty well, but I didn’t try to join together the left and right images. There were too many things going on between the two camera positions that prevented a seamless stitch.

Anyway, I like the gap because there’s no attempt at hiding the artifice of the montage. The effect of a continuous street wall is maintained, nevertheless.