Photomontage: Twenty-Two Thousand

This is a time-lapse photomontage of aerial photos of West Pasco, WA. The photos were obtained by making screen captures of satellite views of the area in Google Earth, with the older photos obtained using the Historical Imagery tool. The photos were taken with the center on GPS coordinates 46º15’53.35”N 119º11’44.34”W, and viewed from an elevation of 22,482 feet (hence the name of the piece). Satellite views were used from a period ranging from 1996 (the oldest available) to 2013 (the most recent).

I created this time-lapse because I wanted to show the development of the Tri-Cities, WA over time. Because a photo taken in 1996 was the oldest available, I wanted to choose a portion of the Tri-Cities that has had a significant amount of change and knew that a lot of housing construction is going in West Pasco right now, so I chose to focus my “photography” there. Taking small sections of the twenty aerial views available, I pieced them together into a montage that formed a map of the growth. Excluding portions of the maps to eliminate control features and other marks on the images that were artifacts that resulted from taking screen captures from Google Earth left an irregular border to the montage, which I accentuated with the placement of sections to create a patchy design.  To balance the whitespace around the image, I left some sections of whitespace near the center of the image. I also added a small section of whitespace near the lower left corner to balance out the heavily dark portion of the image created by the Columbia River.

This was actually the second attempt I made of a photomontage of this area. Here is first one, which used the 1996 view as a background, with sections of the most recent view, along with a few sections from the period in between to show the development of a few areas.