Peter Filene was walking through Central Park one spring morning when he saw a boy with his mother throwing a Frisbee to their dog. He snapped their picture. Without advancing the film in his camera, Filene walked up Fifth Avenue toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He wanted to create a double exposure—two images shot onto the same frame of film. Maybe, he thought, he’d find a painting or sculpture inside the Met that would overlay nicely onto the park scene he’d just shot.
“I have to play intention against chance,” Filene explains. “After the initial shot, I prowl the streets or museums searching for another one to complement it, trying to hold in my mind’s eye the subject, shapes, and colors of the image that waits behind the shutter. I plan and yet I also trust to luck.”
“Jumping in Central Park” by Peter Filene.
Outside the Met, Filene found a street vendor selling his paintings. Filene was drawn to one that portrayed Central Park ice skaters in the winter. He shot it. “Jumping in Central Park,” Filene says, became something he hadn’t anticipated—a picture within a picture, with a dog jumping above tiny skaters, in two seasons at once. “Between ‘grabbing the moment’ and luck,” he says, “all the components fell into place.”
“Self With Man,” by Peter Filene
“I never know when they will. So I keep walking through cities and museums, keep shooting twice, and keep hoping.” For “Self With Man,” Filene shot Josef Albers’ self-portrait in Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum, then aimed the camera at himself.
Peter Filene is professor of history at Carolina.