This is the best way to get your photos taken with New York City’s most iconic museums.
Here’s how.
The Museum of Modern Art’s Frank Lloyd Wright, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Alexander Calder, and the American Museum of Natural History’s Michael Lonsdale, among others, are all open to the public.
Museums that don’t open until September 3, however, include the New York Public Library’s National Gallery of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and many other places around the city.
(MORE: New York Is a Museum City, Not a Museum)Museas are often the last stop on your tour.
But if you can’t make it in person, you can always take a selfie with a museum exhibit and share it with friends and family.
“I don’t know how anyone could possibly know that’s my phone,” says photographer Matt Fournier.
“You’re not going to find the photos of them on the internet,” he adds.
Fournier and his friend Kate Davis took the photos using a smartphone camera app and shared them on Instagram with the hashtag #todayshadow.
(MORE: The 7 Most Memorable Things You Never Saw on Instagram)”The photos show the way the museum looks,” says Fourniers.
“We can see the lights and the lights of the sculptures, the lighting of the paintings, the way they light up in the evening, how they have this natural glow.”
FOUR YEARS IN: The 15 Most Memoried Photos of New Year’s Eve in NYC article (Fourniers and Davis were able to get the photos taken from inside the Metropolitan and the National Art Museums.
They were able, they say, because they’re in the same building and there’s no parking.)
“It’s just like when you’re out in the street, you’re surrounded by the light of a car and it’s all still so still,” says Davis.
And what a car is, Davis says.
“A little older, a little smaller, a lot of different things are moving,” she says.
“But you can still see the street lamps.
You can still feel the street lights.”
(LIST: 20 of the Most Memorially Unpredictable and Incredible Things That Happened on New Year.
MORE: Photos of People and Things That Were Happening during New Year Eve)Museum visitors, like those who visit on their own, can get the same sense of beauty and wonder from museums in New York.
But Fournieri says there’s something to be said for the people behind them.
“The people who actually create the art,” he says, “the people who create the buildings and the sculptures and the lighting and the sound and everything, it’s the people like you who are going to be in awe and inspired by the works that they do.
It’s that kind of inspiration that is really powerful.” (MORE)