7/16/2004

 Millennium Park opening today/tomorrow.

 (Horrible) footage taken on 7/18/2004 (not 7/16)

 7/16/2024

Today is the 20th anniversary of the opening of Millennium Park. I had been following the construction since the first drawings and models were launched in 1998 (at The Cultural Center I think), then taking photos throughout the construction and ever since. The first photos, like all first photos, are exciting because you feel you're documenting it for posterity. That seemed true at the time but probably wasn't. Digital cameras were still in their infancy, but lots of people had them. Some were still using the digital Sony Mavica, one of the first digital cameras that had tiny images comparatively. I was using a mere 2 megapixel Canon, which would shoot a native print size of a 4x6 or 5x7. It's also interesting to note that 2004 was when we were still in a Web 1.0 world on the cusp of social media. In 2024 there are perhaps billions or even trillions of photos of Crown Fountain and The Bean. I once joked that it had been photographed so much that all the images would cancel themselves out because there were so many duplicates: you'd take a photo and it would be blank because it had already been taken.