Then & Now: Recreating a Historic Photograph 100 Years Later
Nearly one hundred years ago, in 1927, members of the early Armenian Church community in Los Angeles gathered for a Fourth of July picnic at Elysian Park and posed for an extraordinary panoramic group portrait.
As the Western Diocese approaches its Centennial in 2027, that historic image became the inspiration for a new Then & Now portrait , bringing nearly 200 clergy, families, community leaders and parishioners together before the St. Leon Ghevontiants Armenian Cathedral.
As Creative Director of Epostle and photographer for the project, I was entrusted with recreating some of the remarkable visual qualities of the original photograph.
The challenge was significant.
The 1927 image had been created using a specialized large-format panoramic camera developed by Kodak, a photographic technology no longer readily available today. A conventional modern wide-angle photograph could capture the entire gathering, but would introduce distortion and sacrifice much of the extraordinary detail visible in the original.
After extensive research and testing, I developed a new photographic process.
Rather than creating a single exposure, the portrait was photographed as a sequence of 11 high-resolution vertical images made one after another and later assembled into one seamless panoramic photograph.
With nearly 200 people in front of the camera, the process left little room for error.
On the morning of July 4, the entire community came together with an extraordinary sense of calm and joy. Three complete photographic sequences were made, 33 exposures in total.
For the first time in more than thirty years as a professional photographer, I left the location without knowing whether I had actually captured the final image. There was no completed photograph to review, only separate pieces that still needed to come together.
Over the following days, something remarkable emerged.
The architecture, light, perspective and people aligned beautifully. Nearly every participant was looking directly into the camera, creating a sense of presence and unity that exceeded what I had imagined possible.
The final image contained such extraordinary resolution that it was later enlarged to approximately 14 feet wide by 10 feet high and installed on the exterior of the Cathedral.
What began as a photographic and technical challenge ultimately became something much more meaningful to me, a reflection on creativity, trust, community and the courage to step beyond what is already known.
The finished portrait now stands as a bridge between generations:
Then and now.
Ancestor and descendant.
Memory and possibility.
View the complete project →
