The Art World and the World Wide Web

that’s high-res enough to give you an image that’s that big. Plus, to scaffold that would be impossible. I thought, “Okay…” and I figured out that if we shot it in small segments, and then stitched those together in Photoshop, that might work. So I tested out the idea of how I could brace the camera properly, right? And what we ended up doing was just shooting with a Canon EOS 5D, because we can do a live view from the camera itself, and line it up according to a grid. So we gridded out the whole room, both ways (x and y) but only at the edges of the wall, just a mark. Then we’d stretch a piece of blue tape across, between the two marks. And we’d run the tripod down every two feet incrementally, all the way to the end. And we’d line it up for that vertical line, and you could always adjust the camera using its live view function. It took us 185 shots.

You’ve done a lot of work with galleries and, of course, museums and artists. Any words of wisdom to pass on to galleries especially?

They have to be more conscious of the fact that their exhibition history is the most valuable thing they have. And very few of them allow the viewer to really explore that in a significant way. Galleries spend a lot of time, energy and money putting on exhibitions and after thirty days they’re gone. So galleries depend on their websites to archive their exhibitions. And the historical aspect of keeping these exhibitions alive on the Web, it’s priceless. The past is the future, see what I’m saying? How you preserve it and present it on the Web is critical to a gallery.

And mostly what we’re seeing are photographs—still images— that just don’t do justice to the exhibition. If all you’ve got is bad photography, what can you do with it when the exhibition has ended? So I always advise galleries to budget so they have 90