Quiztime!

In an attempt to keep my OSI (OSINT, but without the military-industrial baggage) skills sharp, I’m going to try to keep up the #Quiztime challenge over winter break. Let’s begin!

This post (from the December 15th, 2021 challenge) asks us to chronolocate this picture:

Let’s get started!

To begin, let’s figure out where this is.

Part 1 - Geolocation

This image gives me a “New York” vibe, but let’s run my gut check against some details in the photo. Prominent in the background is a rental billboard with a 312 area code:

This puts us in Chicago. Another giveaway would have been the skyscraper in the background, the unmistakeably hideous visage of Trump Tower across from the Riverwalk.

Note for future reference: Construction on Trump Tower was finished ~2010. This will narrow down our chronolocation in part 2.

That leaves us a few blocks from the corner. At first it’s hard to say whether this was taken from north or south of the tower, so let’s look closer.

In the foreground, we see a storefront for Devon Seafood, which looks to have closed down by late 2019:

This puts us on N Wabash Ave, near E Chicago Ave.

Part 2 - Chronolocation

As far as a general timeframe, we know we’re looking for something between January 2009 and 2019.

My partner in this exercise pointed out that the people in the street looked like craft services. Let’s try to think of some movies that have filmed in Chicago in the 2010s.

To narrow this down some more, we also focused on the banner on the right hand side of the image.

The Luma exposition poster places this image nearer to 2009. Based on the attire of the craft services table and the state of the trees in the background, we’ll say this was spring or fall. Based on the greenery in the Google Street View images, we’ll rule out this photo from being any later than April. If it’s in the Spring, it’ll have to be in February or March.

Part 3 - Cheating?

We can also get some biographical detail here. We looked up the poster of the image to see when they would have been in Chicago. The poster is a resident of Germany, so they may not have been in the US very often in the late aughts.

By googling the poster’s [first?] name and the name of their company, we found their full name. From there we found a paper they had written and published. We used a key word (“Media Monitoring”) from this paper to see if there were any conferences on the subject in the US in 2009. Sure enough, we found a press release announcing a conference in the US on March 18, 2009: https://www.cision.com/about/news/2009-press-releases/cision-experts-to-headline-pr-research-monitoring-and-social-media-events-in-spring-09/.

This makes us pretty confident this was taken in March, 2009.

Fun challenge! Until next time,

The Difficult Hell Man