Guest Informant publications were luxury full-color hardcover city guides published annually for rooms in upscale hotels across the country. I did work for the NYC and LA versions.
For both of these collages here I ventured into some hand retouching and painstaking replacing of images on the contact sheets themselves, in this pre-digital era. There’s quite the story associated with the skyline image. In an era before 9/11 it wasn’t that hard to get up onto rooftops to do some photography. I had secured permission for a rooftop with a perfect vista on Third Avenue in midtown NYC, along with a backup rooftop a few blocks away. I already had a few of my ‘daytime to nighttime’ transition collages under my belt so I confidently arrived at the scene, and proceeded to set up my special rig that I had devised over time to help make these composite panoramas.
In this case I was also using a telephoto lens. I didn’t really have a lot of equipment, but I guess the rig looked a little… unusual. Unbeknownst to me and perhaps to the building management was: then-president George Bush Sr. was scheduled to come up Third Avenue by motorcade into the area that very day. Out of nowhere, bursting thru the elevator bulkhead door, I found myself surrounded by 5 NYPD officers with guns drawn. “WTF are you doing here?!? What the hell is this thing?!?” I explained as quickly as I could exactly what I was doing and they stood down and explained to me that there were a couple of secret service sharpshooters on neighboring buildings both with a bead on me, in the off chance I was there to assassinate the president with my mystery rig. I was quickly escorted off the rooftop, no harm no foul, and zipped over to the backup location and somehow managed to get this version done. Not bad for plan B!
David McGlynn 