"Empire State View"

This image captures one of the most extraordinary views in the world — New York City as seen from the top of the Empire State Building in 1961, looking out over the dense grid of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, the East River stretching behind it, the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges visible in the distance, the Chrysler Building's iconic Art Deco spire rising proudly in the foreground.

The cool blue and cream tones of the duplicate transparency give the whole scene a dreamlike, almost architectural quality — less like a photograph and more like a blueprint of a city at the height of its ambition. Every building, every bridge, every block of that impossible island, captured in a small cardboard slide on a single day in 1961.

New York has always been a place that makes you feel small and enormous at the same time. This image captures exactly that.