New York, New York, photo by Harold Davis.

As the fifth anniversary of 9/11 arrives, I’m reviewing my archives of World Trade Tower images. I remember the world before this tragedy as a somewhat gentler and more wonderous place, and these images scanned from film help me remember that feeling.

I took this photo from the Statue of Liberty island sometime in the late 1970s. It was an in-camera double exposure, which in its own way is quite a technical feat, although easy enough to accomplish the same effect today in Photoshop. Technically, in-camera double exposures pose both an exposure challenge and are not so easy to physically align. This negative was the only good one out of a couple of hundred that I took at the scene.

I used a star filter on the lens, which had the side effect of softening the image. Today, in the world of digital, I would probably never use a physical star filter, although I might add a “virtual” star effect in post-processing.

This image was published as a poster in the early 1980s by Bruce McGaw Graphics to commemorate an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.