The New York Times
For the past century, the New York Times has been storing its photographs three floors below street level in a space nicknamed ‘The Morgue.’ Finding a single photograph in this collection of eight million images was always a manual and time-consuming process. With the exception of the archive caretakers, many of these photos hadn’t been seen by other eyes in years.
For journalists to be able to explore these forgotten, historic photos, the Times is using Google Cloud to transform the Times’ photo archive into a searchable digital resource with valuable visual information and associated data. As partners engaged to highlight this project, we sought to make a campaign experience rooted in discovery.
Role: Creative Director
Client: Google Cloud
Agency: Instrument
Year: 2018
Inspired ourselves by a very small selection of the historic photographs, we dove into the incredible web of history, writing stories based on small details found in the images. Since Google Cloud technologies, from secure storage to Cloud Vision API, will be able to aid in discovering information and sparking insights, we brought the photos to new life with this newly contextualized data in deep-dive interactive stories.
We created an immersive desktop and mobile AR experience inviting users to picture how tools like Vision API and ML are helping to uncover patterns and hidden connections within these photos. Each photo takes the user on a captivating deep dive into a series of untold stories; uncovering new meanings, and even new truths.