New Orleans, Louisiana

I first met Bill Klingensmith at an FITC event in Toronto I was speaking at in early 2006. He had driven north from upstate New York, where he was teaching design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I was intrigued by a project he described to me over the din of one of the evening parties: DriveProject, which involved shooting thousands of photos from his car window while on a trip across the USA. His original intent was to transform a long automobile journey into a powerful visual experience by condensing the collected images into an interactive presentation on the Internet.

Fast forward to August of the same year… for his next project phase, DriveProject’06 : New Orleans. Aided by advanced techniques and equipment, his goal was to drive through neighborhoods of New Orleans and somehow capture images that would reflect the current state of recovery efforts (or not) in the area one year after Hurricane Katrina. With a Nikon D2X mounted inside a rooftop carrier on his 2003 Subaru Forester and tethered to an Apple MacBook Pro, Bill recorded the trip using a Garmin eTrex Legend GPS device, collecting over eight thousand photographs of the city’s various neighborhoods in five days. Upon returning home, he placed the images into an interactive map on the Internet, allowing visitors to research and explore the city as it stood one year after the devastating storm. Read all about the project and navigate the visual results here.

Bill has since left the University and started his own studio in Rochester in order to “find greater meaning in life through working with his community and other underdogs who share his passion.” He also volunteers his time as president of the Upstate New York chapter of AIGA, and has a website at www.mydarndest.com.

Keep up the good work, Bill!