In a report on local businesses trying to weather the pandemic, Times readers can scan entire blocks of a small Pennsylvania city.
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“It’s very hard to photograph buildings,” says Jonno Rattman.
It is even harder to capture every building on a city block in a similar frame from across the street. The light changes, the buildings are different sizes and cars get in the way. But that’s what Mr. Rattman, a photographer and printer, spent a lot of time doing earlier this year in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
An article published this month details how downtown Wilkes-Barre held on during the coronavirus pandemic without the economic lifeblood of foot traffic. Mr. Rattman’s pictures of a two-block stretch of South Main Street are stitched together into panoramas that readers can scroll through. A special print section in Sunday’s paper makes use of a horizontal print format Times designers call a pano-8.
To get to the sidewalk level in print, readers need to open the section, then open it again. The pano-8 is a piece of newsprint 48 inches wide that’s folded twice, and it takes a table to read.
The project has roots as far back as October. That’s when The Times’s Business desk thought of examining one American main street, said Alana Celii, a photo editor.
Ms. Celii looked for a city with a mix of small businesses and big box stores that wasn’t within a major metropolitan area. One that was diverse and changing. A place with a story to tell. She approached a national main street organization and asked which cities best met that description. The group said: What about Wilkes-Barre? A former coal-mining town of 41,400 in northeastern Pennsylvania, it was staging a second act, with new development, universities, and growing Mexican and Caribbean communities. Wilkes-Barre fit the profile.
Ms. Celii reached out to Mr. Rattman, who’s originally from Stroudsburg, an hour southeast of Wilkes-Barre, and who now lives part time in a small town on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. In previous projects for The Times, he photographed carbon farming and the shadowy world of consumer debt collectors.
The idea was to reference “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a book by the photographer Edward Ruscha of panoramic collage of a 1.5-mile section of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Larry Newman, a member of a local economic council in Wilkes-Barre, helped connect The Times with business owners on a stretch of South Main Street. Some were making use of federal stimulus payments; all were hustling to keep the lights on. But first, Mr. Rattman began shooting the storefronts.
The work was discouraging at first. The February skies over the Wyoming Valley were often gray, matching the dirtied piles of snow on the ground. It was cold, and the coronavirus was prevalent in Luzerne County.
“I thought, it’s going to be hard to make this place that was already gray, without any people, look like anything,” Mr. Rattman said.
The streetscape made the assignment harder. Downtown Wilkes-Barre is a hodgepodge of historical buildings, stores with more modern facades and a few empty lots. Buildings of different sizes were difficult to frame consistently. The days were short and the sun was low.
“It’s like trying to get a picture of Stonehenge in the right light. It’s a measure of obsessive-compulsiveness,” Mr. Rattman said.
But during his 10 trips to South Main Street between February and May, winter turned to spring and the spread of the virus slowed. Shoppers began to appear. New businesses took up vacancies. By then, Michael Corkery, a Business reporter, was working on profiles of the businesses that had survived.
“We weren’t sure narratively where the story was going to go, so it was pretty beautiful to see the town reopen,” said Molly Bedford, a print designer who led the design of the pano-8.
The project was published online on June 1. With pictures taken on different days, Ms. Celii laid collages for readers to scroll sideways through two city blocks. At first, Ms. Bedford tried to adapt the work to the vertical dimensions of a typical print page. But the horizontal nature of the project called for the pano-8, which can be printed only at The Times’s plant in College Point, Queens.
Details in the collages signal the length of the assignment. Snow is piled in front of the pet shop CDE Exotics. Outside the jerk chicken shop is a tree with new leaves.
Cameron English opened up CDE a few months before the pandemic. When Mr. Rattman visited to make photographs, Mr. English showed off his reptile collection and spoke of big plans for the future.
“It’s kind of incredible what you can find on main street in Pennsylvania,” Mr. Rattman said.
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A Long Look at One Downtown - The New York Times
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