With a modern mobile phone, you pivot for a panorama. With a vintage Kodak Cirkut No. 8, you crank.
Photo hobbyists Christian Fiedler and Marshall Roshto demonstrated Thursday at the Morristown & Township Library, where you can see a century-old picture of the Morristown Green that they re-created with their “Frankencamera,” a replica of the original painstakingly cobbled together with parts they scrounged from the virtual boneyard.
Video: Taking the Frankencamera for a spin:
“Our friendship is based on doing projects that seem kind of crazy at first, but are really fun,” said Fiedler, a Morristown resident and business analyst who is a member of a pinhole camera club.
He and Roshto, an engineer who lives in town, launched this project “because he had some space on his wall to fill, and we took it from there.”
Their sleuthing began last year at the library’s North Jersey History and Genealogy Center.  With help from friends working for beer and sandwiches, they erected a scaffold on South Street in November and attempted to align the Cirkut as closely as possible with the view captured by William Parker sometime in the 1910s.
While many things have changed over the years, a fire hydrant, the Morristown United Methodist Church and the building that now houses Blue Mercury would be familiar to a time traveler from the turn of the last century.
You can read our full story of this photographic journey here. The library exhibit runs through May 2026.
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Thanks everyone for a great event at the Library! This exhibit is available to view whenever the Library is open: Mon-Thurs 9-9, Fri & Sat 9-5, Sun 1-5.