Going back to collage

I've been struggling with the collage work, trying to narrow it down - make it more believable. To do that I took the extracted pictures from my father's people in Paterson and placed them in a Paterson context both from inside and outside images. To gather those images I went to Google Maps and also to NJ Realty websites. I added apartments into the mix since many people living in the first ward ghetto are not home owners with the exception of the 200 plus Habitat houses that have been built in the past 25 years, in part due to the vision of my father who saw all the abandoned homes and barren lots as opportunity. In conjunction with the city of Paterson who donated those lots to rebuild a better Paterson.

So, first I went around Google maps to look at the old neighborhood. It was a mixture of new habitat houses and old abandoned buildings. At the same time, my brother was visiting from California and we scanned in some images of Paterson in 1901 from the floods and the fire. It was interesting to see these buildings with Victorian white immigrants from Ireland and Italy. The photographs were made from an old 8x10 glass plates. Somehow they made it into my father's possession. Each photo was labelled with the area that it was taken. We started pulling up the areas on Google maps. In the span of 115 years the change in the city was very apparent. Here are those pictures….