Since 2021, Richard Palmer has photographed and mapped more than 200 works for The Pittsburgh Public Art Archive<\/a> from Ambridge to Braddock and everywhere in between using a Gigapan \u2014 a telephoto camera on a robotic arm that creates massive, high-resolution panoramic photos.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is meant to be an archive for people to use and to save the images for when they\u2019re no longer extant,\u201d Palmer says. \u201cMy smallest images are a couple of hundred megapixels, and they range into the gigapixel.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of those big murals, you can zoom in and see the grout work in the bricks or between pieces of mosaic.\u201d<\/p>\n The project had humble beginnings. In 2021, the Hill District Community Development Corporation reached out to the CREATE Lab, asking if someone would photograph the \u201cLooking Through a Keyhole Into a Jazz Club\u201d mural at Wylie Avenue and Erin Street before it was permanently covered up.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter visiting the site and getting permission and all that, I brought my equipment up and photographed that particular mural, then walked around to the other side of the building, \u2026 and the whole side of the building was a mural dedicated to August Wilson,\u201d Palmer says.<\/p>\n Hill residents were quick to point out other murals in the neighborhood, which Palmer also photographed, and, before long, a citywide plan began to take shape.<\/p>\n If you were to judge Palmer by his academic record, you wouldn\u2019t think him much of a photographer. He studied chemistry at CMU and worked myriad roles in the field throughout the 1970s and 1980s before enrolling at University of California, Berkeley in 1988 for a bachelor\u2019s degree in plant molecular biology.<\/p>\n Two years later, he headed to the University of Hawaii for a doctorate in botany and ecology. In the years after his 1996 graduation, he got a job with the Hawaii State Department of Health\u2019s Hazard Evaluation and Emergency Response office.<\/p>\n \u201cMy job was, mostly, going around to the islands and searching for and evaluating abandoned sugar mills for environmental cleanup,\u201d Palmer says. \u201cThere was always photography involved with that, but it was during my grad school days that I really got involved in photography \u2014 out in the field, photographing my study areas, my study plans, trying to photograph Hawaiian birds.\u201d<\/p>\n In February 2007, he was reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and saw a CREATE Lab advertisement seeking alpha testers for their new Gigapan mount. Palmer signed up for more information. Come July, he received the lab\u2019s last alpha unit, and began posting his work to gigapan.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Randy Sargent has been the CREATE Lab\u2019s visualization director since 2005, but his work with high-resolution panorama tech dates back to his time as a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, where he developed an interactive viewer for panoramas taken by the Mars rover.<\/p>\n Gigapan is that system\u2019s technological predecessor. It literally brought that technology down to Earth.<\/p>\n Sargent says gigapan is similar to Google Maps\u2019 Street View \u2014 it takes photos and stitches them together to create something explorable. But instead of creating a globe-spanning but low-resolution picture like Street View, Gigapan opts for selective, high-quality images.<\/p>\n \u201cThe level of resolution of the pictures invites you to just go hunting around because a lot of these panoramas are a billion pixels \u2014 a gigapixel \u2014 or many gigapixels,\u201d Sargent says.<\/p>\n For example, one Gigapan spinoff, \u201cProject Time Machine,\u201d takes time-lapses of national parks like Yosemite, which are used by geologists studying how rock faces have changed over time.<\/p>\n \u201cEven today, so many years after Gigapan first started, that initial \u2018aha\u2019 moment of being able to zoom in on Mars, there\u2019s still something that is important,\u201d Sargent adds.<\/p>\n Sargent says that when Palmer got his Gigapan prototype, he did \u201camazing things.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI took a \u2018macro-panorama\u2019 of the side of the shed in my backyard because of the color and texture of the wood and the rope, and they said, \u2018We never thought of using it like that before,\u2019\u201d Palmer recalls.<\/p>\n Palmer returned to Pittsburgh in 2011, and has been contributing to the CREATE Lab\u2019s work on Gigapan since.<\/p>\n As the leader of \u2014 and chief curator for \u2014 the Pittsburgh Public Art Archive, Palmer says he primarily photographs commissioned works including murals, mosaics and sculptures.<\/p>\n Kyle Holbrook, a muralist who was commissioned to work on the \u201cLooking Through a Keyhole Into a Jazz Club\u201d mural with Chris Savido, has painted more than 400 murals<\/a> in Pittsburgh alone. He says that projects like the Pittsburgh Public Art Archive preserve more than paint on a wall, but culture, memory and stories of neighborhoods that shape the city\u2019s identity.<\/p>\n \u201cI just think it\u2019s so important \u2014 documenting the works. I love it. Murals are living public history. They belong to the community. So archiving them, and with high-resolution stuff like Gigapan, it\u2019s preserving history.\u201d<\/p>\n The Jazz Club mural and nearby August Wilson mural \u2014 which is also on Palmer\u2019s map \u2014 were or still are community gathering points in the Hill District. But even viewing them in person didn\u2019t always give way to the detail Holbrook and Savido put into the piece, he says.<\/p>\n Savido, Holbrook says, was tasked with painting the background figures. He went all-in on small details.<\/p>\n \u201cAll those little people have little faces, but they look like little dots,\u201d Holbrook says. \u201cYou can probably see it now with the Gigapan.\u201d<\/p>\n But Max Gonzales, another local artist whose works are featured in the archive, finds the project wanting.<\/p>\n Murals, by simply existing, are ephemeral and impermeable, in the sense that they can fade or disappear, Gonzales says. In order to fully \u201carchive\u201d the city\u2019s art, the Pittsburgh Public Art Archive needs more detail and connection with the artists whose work it documents.<\/p>\n For example, the \u201cLooking Through a Keyhole Into a Jazz Club\u201d mural lists both Holbrook\u2019s and Savido\u2019s names but is labeled simply as \u201cKeyhole \u2013 Jazz Greats.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn no way is it public facing enough, in my opinion, to actually say that it is for the service of those artists, because if the artists don\u2019t even know that it exists, then there is no function for the artist or those communities or those property owners,\u201d Gonzales says.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/20240221_161059-1-scaled.jpg\")
Richard Palmer poses for a selfie with a lifelike sculpture of a man at Gateway Center. The sculpture, alongside 14 others, is the handiwork of New Jersey-based artist Seward Johnson. Photo courtesy of Richard Palmer.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/embrace-kindness-mural-by-crissy.jpeg\")
Mural by Shane Pilster and Max \u201cGEMS\u201d Gonzales on the corner of Main and 10th streets. Photo by Cristina Holtzer.<\/p>\n