Two NJ Photographers Recreate 115-Year-Old Panorama With the Original Camera

Christian Fiedler and Marshall Roshto had walked past the same enormous panoramic photograph countless times at Jersey Boy Bagels, the Morristown library, and the local hospital. Shot around 1910 by William Parker, whose studio operated in Morristown from the turn of the century through the 1930s, the image shows Morristown Green crowded with horse-drawn carriages alongside Model Ts, every figure dressed formally, the Green itself laid out nearly as it stands today. The two New Jersey photographers became fixated on one question: could they recreate it using the exact same type of camera Parker used?

The answer required about a year of work. Fiedler and Roshto tracked down and rebuilt a Kodak Cirkut No. 8, a clockwork-driven rotating panoramic camera that shoots on 8-inch-tall film and produces negatives running three to five feet long. These cameras were workhorses of early 20th-century photography, used widely for capturing military regiments, graduating classes, and cityscapes. Rebuilding the Cirkut No. 8's internals consumed the better part of that year before the camera was operational.

Research at the North Jersey History and Genealogy Center helped the pair date the original and trace Parker's studio history. They determined the original vantage point was an elevated position on South Street, almost certainly the roof or balcony of Parker's studio itself. That structure is long gone, replaced by restaurants and condominiums, so Fiedler and Roshto rented scaffolding to get as close to that height as possible. The town of Morristown issued the necessary permits and waived the permit fees entirely once officials learned what the project involved. Friends were recruited to help erect the scaffolding, motivated, per Patch reporting, by promises of lunch.

In November 2025, they made the shot. The resulting panorama, which they titled "Revolution on the Green," places modern Morristown directly alongside Parker's Edwardian-era image. The Model Ts and horse buggies are gone, replaced by sedans and SUVs, and the streets read as markedly busier. Roshto made a deliberate choice to keep that busyness visible in the final image. "It's much busier; we intentionally left in some of the blurry cars, because it kind of felt right," he told Patch. "Things are moving much faster nowadays, the busyness kind of just felt like a nice transition from what seems to be a slower-paced picture in the original."

Because the Cirkut camera rotates on a clockwork mechanism during the long exposure, moving vehicles register as blur across the wide negative, a characteristic artifact of the format that the photographers preserved rather than eliminated. The effect communicates something the technical specs alone cannot: the tempo of a city more than a century on.

Not everything changed. "The things that stayed the same, I think, are just as interesting as the things that have changed," Roshto said. "A lot of the building architecture is similar." Juxtaposed side by side, the two panoramas share the same spatial logic: the park at center, the surrounding streets, the bones of the same historic buildings holding the edges of the frame.

Sources differ slightly on the original photograph's date, with some accounts citing 1910 and the local Patch report specifying 1912. The North Jersey History and Genealogy Center, which Fiedler and Roshto consulted during their research, would be the appropriate resource for resolving that question against archival records.