There are many who think that visually captivating, expressive, and meaning-rich images must be the product of complex and uniquely original thought.

But, really, it can be as simple as a reinterpretation of a long ago way of seeing.

For example, Joshua Heineman’s “Reaching for the Out of Reach” project. Heineman has been animating stereoscopic photographs form the New York Public Library’s online archive by simply placing the two separate images together as animated .GIF files. He’s completed forty-four so far; I hope he never stops.

Technically, the files are a pretty simple thing to create. However, these images – in tandem with Heineman’s well-chosen title for the project – say so much about technology’s influence on how we experience the world through photographs.

And while very cool to look at, the emotions stirred by Heineman’s efforts trump the visual niftyness of old pictures re-jiggered with software. The frantic movement of these .GIFs implies a hurried movement of the eyes and inspires all sorts of ruminations: on the peculiar nature of our own vision (two eyes producing a single image), and on our sometimes desperate desire to know what lies just beyond the frame of a photograph.

Most deeply engaging for me is the new vision of the era within which these photos were made – just before Muybridge‘s motion studies brought still images to life, and a time when people yearned to create immersive realities with images but hadn’t quite figured out how.

Given our current visual environment, it’s easy to forget about a time when photography really was reaching for the out of reach. Spend some time with these images for an affecting reminder.

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