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METROPOLIS REDUX
© 2008 Darrell Taylor All rights reserved.

The image above is a digital "collage" of several hundred individual pictures and picture fragments. I spent about four months constructing it in Photoshop CS3. The original image file weighs in at over 1.4 gigabytes--25,920 pixels wide, by 7,050 pixels in height. Printed at 300 dpi, the picture would be over seven feet wide. I have reduced the size by 75% for web display.

I started making these "surreallegories" in imaging software then available in the early '90s, and my first website in 1995 included several that I had constructed more or less one pixel at a time. Today's imaging software and storage capacities make working with much larger images feasible.

This picture is a salute to New York City by way of Fritz Lang and Google. Though I took a majority of the photos used in the collage, many were purloined from the web, and "quoted" here (that is resized, distorted to fit, recolored, reversed, and in other ways violated) to flesh out an image from my memories and imagination of the Big Apple. The zoom option will yield access to a NY that never was--celebrities, TV personalities, musicians and artists, hidden friends, impossible geographical juxtapositions, a surreal infrastructure to support the surface dramas, fashionistas, and other evocations of the city that never sleeps. A full exploration will take a while.