Looking for filler photo from 1999 New York Times

April 5, 2024 11:12 AM

In or around 1999, the New York Times printed a photograph of me and my teenage friends standing or sitting on the rock overlooking the Great Lawn in Central Park. How could I find this photo again?

The picture appeared somewhere in the inner pages of the paper, main or metro section. I don't remember what story it accompanied. It showed us from behind, looking out over the pond and the Great Lawn (the photographer, a woman, thought we were playing hooky, I think, and didn't want to include our faces).

I have scrolled pretty far through the photo archives on the Times website looking for this, but in retrospect it seems obvious it wouldn't be there -- they presumably don't list all the photos in the print editions online, there would be far too many.

Does an accessible copy of this photograph likely exist anywhere? And, if so, how could I go about trying to find it?

posted by grobstein to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

How much patience do you have? Many libraries hold the NYT on microfilm. Then it's just a matter of cranking the reader like an old-school detective until you find what you're looking for. There are bound volumes, too, but film is likely faster.
posted by praemunire at 11:24 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

The Times Machine has digital pictures of back issues of the time, so if you can figure out what issue it was from, you could see it there.

Do you remember any details from the caption that might help in the text search? Was your name in the caption?

My hometown newspaper published a photo of me when I was a toddler taking swimming lessons and I dig it out of their archives every few years by searching on the name in the caption which was, somewhat ironically, not mine, because they had it wrong. But I know what the error was so I can still find it.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:25 AM on April 5 [3 favorites]

The ProQuest database has access to the New York Times from this era, including photographs, but the picture quality is horrible and very grainy. (It has about 250 articles from 1999 that include the words "Central Park," so I wasn't up for browsing through all of them.)

Depending on your access to public library or university library databases, you should be able to access at least a horrible-quality photo that way, but it may take considerable digging.

The New York Public Library has (on-site only) access to the full NYTimes archive from 1851-2019, and they offer fee-based research, document delivery, and microfilm digitization, so if you can (by using ProQuest, for example) figure out the right day and page number, they might be able to reproduce the photograph for you.
posted by Jeanne at 11:34 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

If you or someone you know has a subscription to the New York Times, you can search a specific date range for specific terms, and then view digital images of the search results using the Times Machine service. I just searched 1/1/1999-12/31/1999 for "Central Park". It found quite a few articles, but I bet you could get through them in a couple of hours. You can also narrow the search by section (e.g. "Metro" if you know it wasn't in the first section) to speed up your search.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 11:46 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

(just came to say that this: "the photographer, a woman, thought we were playing hooky, I think, and didn't want to include our faces" -- is super cool of her. Must have remembered the Seinfeld episode.)
posted by knownassociate at 11:51 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

The databases don't have full access to images.
posted by praemunire at 11:52 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

The databases don't have full access to images.

There are a couple of different databases, so just to be clear, the NYT Times Machine archive does contain photos, because it's a scan of every single page of the New York Times, and it should contain your photo* because the Times Machine services covers all newspapers from Sept 18, 1851 until Dec 31, 2002.

Your best bet (unless you want to manually click through every page of every newspaper from 1999) is to try to figure out which article your photo accompanied. You could use Times Machine, which does have a search function, or one of the other NYT databases (whether or not it has photos).

Once you've figured out which article it is, or have a plausible shortlist of articles, then you'll have the date they originally ran and can go to Times Machine to pull up the newspapers from that date and see if the page has the photo. It won't be an individual image file you can download, but in my experience the scan quality is quite high so you should be able to get a fairly good screenshot.

*assuming it ran in the Late edition published in New York City.
posted by andrewesque at 12:30 PM on April 5 [3 favorites]

another possibility -- I'm going to guess there weren't tons of women photographers on the Times' metro section in 1999. some searching might turn up a listing of Times photo staff for the year, and from there, you might be able to narrow it down to a few names, and then possibly contact them. My newspaper photog friends are pretty good about keeping personal archives of their shots, or at least know what they took and when. Check this link, maybe.
posted by martin q blank at 12:33 PM on April 5 [3 favorites]

Hmm, for some reason I thought Times Machine wasn't complete on images, either, but I'll take your word for it.

Your best bet (unless you want to manually click through every page of every newspaper from 1999) is to try to figure out which article your photo accompanied.

If it was a "filler" article, it might have been something super-generic ("April showers bring May flowers!" or "kids: still visiting the park!" sorts of things). The Times Machine search function is also kind of wonky, because the scanned text was apparently not corrected very well, so there are lots of misreading artifacts. Meanwhile, I think you could probably get through main and metro sections of spring, fall, and winter (not summer, because of the "hooky" business) 1999 on microfilm, just scanning for a picture, not particular text, in a day or less, even if previously unfamiliar with microfilm. You could narrow it down further if you remember anything about the weather, e.g. snow on the ground, or whether you think you were wearing jackets or shorts. I like the shortcuts of the digital era very much, but sometimes a little old-fashioned shoe leather is called for.

grobstein, I hope you'll tell us if you find it, and, if so, how!
posted by praemunire at 1:44 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Wondering if you can find the names of all the female photographers at the Times at the time and then search by that name?
posted by latkes at 1:53 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Anyone with a NYPL account can search all the pages of the NYT.
posted by Ideefixe at 2:12 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

I am sure you have done this, but just in case, have you asked your teenage friends who are also in the picture if they remember when it ran in the paper. Even a month or "early April" will help.

Seems to me we have eliminated July and August if you were in school when the picture was taken. Doesn't sound like there was snow on the ground. So, the picture is likely from September to November and March to May. Maybe June.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:43 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

You may have some luck pinning down the photo if you can narrow down the date a bit more:

- if you can remember the season by thinking about what you were wearing in the photo, or even just vague details of the weather that day, you can probably eliminate quite a few months

- if your assumption that the photographer thought you were unusually out of school is correct, and if you assume that a photo taken on one day will appear the next day, then you can eliminate any Sunday or Monday edition, since a photo taken on Monday wouldn’t appear until Tuesday and a photo taken Friday wouldn’t appear until Saturday

- if you can recall what brought you to the park at all if it wasn’t one of your normal haunts, you may be able to narrow down the dates further — were you on your way back home from a movie, for example, whose theatrical release dates you can find?
posted by mdonley at 2:45 PM on April 5 [2 favorites]

Your best bet (unless you want to manually click through every page of every newspaper from 1999) is to try to figure out which article your photo accompanied.

I think it’s likely this photo didn’t accompany a story. It could’ve been a standalone/slice of life photo. If it is, and they didn’t include their names, OP would have to just manually look through the archive.
posted by girlmightlive at 3:14 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]

"Joyce Dopkeen was the first female staff photographer for The New York Times in 1973, and worked there until 2008."

I think your best angle is to find out which female photographers were working then and then search on newspapers.com for the name between the years 1998- 2000 in New York City.

I don't know if they credited each photo? worth a chance to start there

Maybe female photographers are still alive and can help you. I would find out who the female photographers were. I would start there.
posted by cda at 3:30 PM on April 5 [1 favorite]