Check Out Some Student Work!
Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park - Chris Samoray
Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park is in the heart of Washington, DC. The park opened in 1936 and features design from landscape architects George Burnap and Horace Peaslee, plantings envisioned by Ferruccio Vitale, and hardscaping by John Earley, who became the world’s leading expert on concrete-making. The Meridian Hill's name is derived from Thomas Jefferson's vision of a new prime meridian set in the United States, which ran adjacent to 16th street. During the 1960s, the park hosted Civil Rights gatherings and protests, and later became locally known as Malcolm X Park.
The time-lapse project grew from an interest in assessing how people use and move through public spaces, similar to William Whyte's work in New York City around 1980. The project was a submission for the artistic project in Professor Jack Sullivan's Landscape and Garden History class. Different sites of the park were selected as shooting locations, with some locations frequented more often than others by park visitors. Shooting the time-lapse involved taking up to 1,000 photos, generally at 2-3 second intervals, for 15-30 minutes at each location. In total, nearly 4,000 photos were taken using a Canon EOS M10 camera. The photos were edited in Adobe Lightroom and combined into a time-lapse using Adobe Premier.
