Brooklyn Bridge

By Albina Khayrulina & Simmi Kaur.

Then:

Now:

We took a photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge and tried to recreate Hassam’s painting. We can see through technical details that the photo and the painting match. For example, the artist was standing to the right of the walkway in the painting, and we tried to mimic this perspective by using the angles of leading lines of the railing. The left line has a lower angle, while the right line has a steeper angle. Both of these show us that the artist stood slightly to the right and purposely situated the bridge off-center. The actual towers of the bridge are not in the center, but also on the right side of the picture. We also used the vanishing point (located around the staircase in the image) to position our photograph. Another feature that helped us position our photograph are the barely visible second towers of the bridge. We tried to get the towers/arches in the photograph to be about the same size as they are in the painting.
Recreating the exact painting is obviously impossible but this task was a lot more difficult than expected. There are several changes that cause our photograph to look different. The walkway ramp is higher today than when it was in Hassam’s time. This can be seen by the carriages, which are almost level with the pedestrian walkway. Today, the cars are not visible in from that angle. In addition, it is easy to tell that the walkway has been narrowed since Hassam’s time and thus, we weren’t able to completely achieve the same angle, since that would put us on the highway itself. The staircase is gone because of the bicycle lane, and the benches of the left side have been removed. Still, this photograph comes pretty close to replicating Hassam’s painting.