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 Khnh 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…
Above: Elf, 2003
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961
Annie Hall, 1977
You’ve Got Mail, 1998
The Incredible Hulk, 2008
The Avengers, 2012
The Boondock Saints, 1999
The Brave One, 2007
Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan, 2012
25th Hour, 2002
The Longest Week, 2012
Baby Mama, 2008
Scott Pilgrim vs the World, 2010
Factory Girl, 2006