The Worgelt Apartment, Interior (Night), Microphone

Pilson made this photograph in the late 1920s study of one of the founders of the Gotham Silk Hosiery Company—a room that has migrated from its original location at 525 Park Avenue to the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, where it is on view year-round but behind glass. Although the artist brought equipment to shoot moving as well as still images, he found that simply bringing the video camera and microphone across the threshold into the period room—as if from the future—and placing them casually around the room was enough to disrupt any nostalgic impulse to simulate the past. The gradated shift between color and black and white in the image, which further makes hay with the distinction between past and present, was the result, however, of a happy accident during post-production work on the original digital file.