What do Philadelphia’s city workers see out their windows? This artist spent years finding out.

More than 180 years ago, Joseph Saxton was working at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia when he pointed a camera of his own creation out the window, capturing what is now the oldest surviving photograph in the country.

Emilio Martínez Poppe last year returned to the location, now home to the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, to capture a new image. Its sharpness, color, and complexity are in stark contrast to the blurry snapshot from 1839, of what was then Central High School and the Philadelphia Armory.

A white window frame forms the outside of the image, with orchids and a plastic watering can arranged on the sill along the bottom. Philadelphia’s Masonic Temple, a national historic landmark built in 1873, can be seen in the middle of the image, while the top of City Hall, designed in the French Second Empire style, peeks out from the left.

Martínez Poppe learned about the original photograph as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Returning to the site was a “full circle moment,” he said.

For several years, Martínez Poppe has been visiting municipal buildings in Philadelphia to photograph views from the inside out. He’s documented what city workers see from their windows, and heard their reasons for choosing a career in public service.

He is presenting the project, titled “Civic Views,” in an exhibit opening on Friday, May 23, and commissioned in this iteration by Mural Arts Philadelphia. The display will also include the words of workers across over 20 city agencies, who Martínez Poppe interviewed throughout the project.

A theme many of them expressed was: “I am the city.”

“It’s a really powerful concept to contend with, when you embody such an enormous institution, but at the same time, you are a recipient of its services,” he said.

The exhibit, curated by Jameson Paige, runs through June 11 in City Hall’s courtyard, alongside a series of public events, including a performance by the Municipal Employees Choral Ensemble.

Afterward, photos from the project will be displayed at the Municipal Services Building.

“I wanted to understand how the people who care for ... and manage the city are oriented in their own work,” said Martínez Poppe. “How did they arrive to fill the positions that they occupy, and what kind of disposition do they carry when they are doing the work?”

On a Tuesday afternoon in February, Martínez Poppe traveled to offices across Center City to take pictures of city building windows.

Around him, workers’ desks displayed collages of everyday objects and comforts of the workday-home — landline telephones, a list of pay-day and holiday schedules, a mini crockpot, a “Go Birds” banner and other Eagles memorabilia, drawings by children, antibacterial gel, stacks of papers piled high above the cubicle walls.

Martínez Poppe erected a tripod and camera in a small multipurpose room painted white. He angled the camera to look out the window. Nearby, office water cooler jugs lined a wall.

The photography project started as an attempt to demystify “this kind of abstraction of the city,” says Martínez Poppe, who also works for local government, in New York City.

When he started photographing municipal office windows in Philadelphia, many employees were still working from home due to the pandemic, and he found empty offices and dusty windowsills. Since then, city employees have returned to the office full time — which some have expressed in interviews as a “sore spot,” he said.

Martínez Poppe hopes his work illustrates how municipal workers are “negotiating the challenges and opportunities of living in Philadelphia, negotiating the contradictions of trying to make progressive change in the city, but also dealing with bureaucratic challenges along the way,” he said.

Martínez Poppe also hopes to celebrate municipal work through the installation.

“So much of what is so wonderful about the city is in large part due to the public services that the city offers, and the hard work that public employees do,” he said.

Many workers told Martínez Poppe their mothers nudged them toward city work. For Bridget Collins-Greenwald, it was her dad.

A fourth-generation city employee, Collins-Greenwald works at the department of licenses and inspections. In her office hang two retirement plaques – her father‘s, from the water department, and one for her grandmother, who was a labor leader for AFSCME District Council 33.

For over 12 years Collins-Greenwald worked on City Hall’s seventh floor as the Commissioner of Public Property in a “fabulous” office. The window looked out on Center City, where she would gaze during phone calls, or when some commotion outside caught her attention.

Now, in her new position, her office view looks out on a closed gym.

“I’m hoping someone’s gonna move in there,” she said.

Many office windows look out onto walls, Martínez Poppe said, and some workspaces felt like they needed a renovation, while others looked new. In “really serendipitous moments” he was inside an agency’s building capturing a photo while that agency’s vehicle passed by outside, he says.

Waffiyyah Murray, Indego Program Manager for the City of Philadelphia, says she has a great view of out an office window in the Municipal Services Building.

“I’m able to just see kinda like the heart of the city in a way,” she said in April. “A lot of folks just cross paths through City Hall or through Dilworth Plaza.”

Looking out of worker’s windows, Martínez Poppe often noticed construction cranes. Gentrification has been a frequent topic in his conversations with city workers, some concerned about increasing housing costs and neighborhood names changing. Some have told him they can’t afford to live where they grew up.

“Several times I’ve heard ‘when I was growing up there was a sense of neighborhood. My mom didn’t need to know where I was, because everybody on the block knew where I was,’” Martínez Poppe said. And now, they’ve told him, “‘I don’t know my neighbors.’”

In the City Hall exhibit, Martínez Poppe’s pictures will be printed to scale, so viewers can see what municipal workers see. The images will be hung on scaffolding, to symbolize “a city under construction and undergoing change,” he said.

“These agencies, these institutions, some are really old, some are pretty new, some have closed, some have changed [their] name,” he said. “They may feel enormous and intractable and unmoving and impossible to overcome or transform, and yet they were made by humans, and so they can be changed by humans.”

“And,” he said, “so many people are doing that from within.”