Brooklyn native and amateur photographer George Bradford Brainerd was an engineer by trade, but has a passion for photography and natural history. From 1872 through 1887, he shot all around New York City, using cameras he designed and built himself.
As part of a personal research project and as an effort to highlight his relatively unknown accomplishments, Jordan Liles created this amazing video project to showcase Brainerd's photos juxtaposed with the same locations as they appear today.
On the project, Liles comments:
George Brainerd was a very accomplished professional in early photography and other fields, and if you search for his name on Google you'll notice that his contributions have been forgotten.
After seeing several articles around the web showing New York photographs comparing the 1960s to 2013, I asked myself: "Instead of going back 50 years, what if we could compare today to the earliest surviving photos?"
It's a personal project for me. There are no sponsors. I'm not doing this for a class, organization or anything similar. This project gave me a reason to go out on my bike on weekend mornings for almost a year to shoot photographs, many times returning to the same spots over and over to do reshoots if I wasn't satisfied with previous results.
Submitted via Viewing NYC Tips
Matt Coneybeare
Editor in Chief
Matt enjoys exploring the City's with his partner and son. He is an avid marathon runner, and spends most of his time eating, running, and working on cool stuff.
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