This year our annual Macaulay Honors College/CUNY Snapshot student-curated exhibit of student photos taken on October 11th was on display for one day at the New-York Historical Society.  Here are some of my own snapshots (and one video of a multimedia display) of the event.

Students were asked to take part in a “re-curation” of the exhibit by taking photos of different parts of it while considering these questions:

Imagine you live in the year 2114 and discover this photo exhibit from 100 years ago. What ideas do these photos give about the peculiar lives of New Yorkers in 2014? What were these people from the past trying to say about their lives? Take pictures of photos in the exhibit, treat them as if you are examining them from the future, and caption them with your impressions.

When you’re looking at the other exhibits (Leibovitz, Jerni Collection, etc.) on display, you are looking into the past. Compare what you see in those exhibits to the Snapshot photos using the same criteria: what seems to have changed about life in New York City? What has stayed the same?

What strikes you, a person living in 2114, as particularly different or similar about life in the 21st century (2014)? … about life in the 20th century? … about life in the 19th century?