Take that, Thomas Kinkade
Last Saturday night, the National Museum of the American Indian became the latest subject of a Big Shot, a project overseen by photography professors from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Since 1987, three professors from R.I.T.--the husband-and-wife team of Bill DuBois and Dawn Tower DuBois, plus Michael Peres--have traveled to numerous notable buildings and structures, to which they recruit hundreds of volunteers bearing flashlights or flash cameras. The volunteers scan and splash the buildings with light, in random fashion, as the photographers take shots with exposures lasting 30 seconds or more.
When it works, the resulting image is of a building that has been painted (or "smeared," as Bill DuBois puts it) with light.
Some 800 people braved rain and chills to gather on the National Mall last weekend to help illuminate the museum, which has been celebrating its fifth anniversary.
The R.I.T. Big Shot is named after similar events sponsored by the Sylvania Corporation in the 1950s. The Sylvania photographers, however, used synchronized flash bulbs.
