The first known aerial photograph was taken over Paris by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, a French photographer and balloonist, in 1858. Tournachon used a wet plate collodion process that required the photographic material to be prepared, exposed, and developed from a portable darkroom while aloft in a basket suspended from a gas balloon. From the 1880s to… Read more »
The Montauk Library’s archival collection includes stellar examples of aerial photography. This overview from the Al Holden Collection is undated, but if we research the motels and businesses that appear in the picture it seems certain it was photographed in the 1950s. In fact, this aerial view beautifully documents the early years of Montauk’s booming… Read more »
Ken Weldon worked from 1963 through the 1980s at the Montauk Beach Company selling real estate. The 1960s were high times for sales in Montauk housing developments like Culloden Shores. Some of the maps and paper records used by Ken were donated to the Montauk Library by Ken and Loretta Weldon,… Read more »
The decade of the 1920s is filled with ingenuity and invention in the field of aviation. Visionaries like Sherman Fairchild pushed aviation science forward, intertwining aesthetics and engineering. Fairchild (1896-1971) was fascinated by “photogrammetry,” the science of gleaning map measurements from photographs. When he was 21 years old Fairchild designed an… Read more »
This aerial view donated by the Windsor family to the Montauk Library Archives shows the center of Montauk Village from the late 1950s or early 1960s. A photographic foray into recent history, it reveals a number of easily recognizable buildings. In addition, gaps in the aerial landscape, i.e., those stores and businesses that… Read more »