Movie Stills Aligned Against Their Exact Locations (Part 2)

Elf, 2003

Photographer and dedicated cinephile Christopher Moloney travels across the world, particularly throughout New York, with a few black and white film stills in tow to capture intriguing juxtapositions of said stills against their real-life locations. This ongoing project is known as FILMography, a portmanteau of the words film and photography. We first came across Moloney's fascinating project a few months ago and he has since expanded his ever-growing collection of films to include a diverse mix of cinema from the holiday hit Elf and Woody Allen's romantic comedy Annie Hall to the comedy Baby Mama and the Audrey Hepburn classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Similar to the method of photographers Khánh Hmoong and Taylor Jones, Moloney uses an on-location layering technique to alert the viewer's senses to the passage of time. Holding a monochromatic printout against the colorful present setting adds to one's heightened perception of time. Perhaps even more interesting than the apparent passage of time and the visible changes or similarities to any given neighborhood is the fact that the pictured stars have walked along the same paths that the ordinary civilians in the background are occupying right now. To think, a street now busy with rushing yellow taxis was once the meeting grounds for The Avengers...