Photographs are a wonderful phenomenon; they allow you to see into the past while you're in the present. But what if you can combine the two? Taylor Jones' simple idea gave rise to Dear Photograph, the now popular photo blog which allows you to see old photographs set in the present.
The idea behind the blog is simple: take an old picture, go to the place where it was taken, line it up to against the frame of the location, and take another picture. You then get a picture of a picture, only this one carries a bit more weight with the now apparent passage of time.
Blog founder curator Taylor Jones stumbled onto the idea while browsing through an old family album. He found a picture of his younger brother, and saw that his brother was also in the room, giving him a weird sense of nostalgia. Jones got his camera, took the old photo, lined it up with the original location, snapped the picture, uploaded it, and within a few months his blog had gone viral.
The magic of the photographs within photographs is immediately obvious; viewers get to see how much has changed within the span of time, and those in the pictures get a priceless feeling of nostalgia.This after all is the purpose of taking pictures nowadays, to preserve a moment in time for all of eternity.
Here, the moment gains more meaning as people can see just how much the place has changed since taking the original picture. Sometimes, the place remains the same, only the people have grown up or passed away. The only certainty presented in these images is that once a moment in time has passed, it can never be recovered, only preserved and appreciated in pictures.
This is Taylor Jones' Dear Photograph photo blog. There's also a facebook fan page here. You can keep looking into the past with the upcoming Dear Photograph book to be released sometime next week.
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