Tuesday 21 December 2010

Seeing ghosts....

Sergey Larenkov is an amateur photographer who collects old wartime postcards and had the idea of combining them with modern day photos.  He spends time researching the exact place where the wartime photographer stood to take the shot, so that he can line up his modern day photo to match it, then uses Photoshop to meld the two together.

It's like looking at ghosts.

It's a reminder that the past is all around us, we are enmeshed in history whether we like it or not.  Where we are walking, stuff happened - good, bad, beautiful, horrific, mundane or of world importance - it occurred, right here. Do click on the pictures to make them bigger and get the full details:





You can see more of the pictures at Sergey's blog

Jo Teeuwisse has done something similar with pictures from Amsterdam:


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You can read more information about her work here.  (My Modern Met - where I found all these pictures in the first place - is fast becoming one of my absolute favourite websites.  It says it's a site "where art enthusiasts and trendspotters connect over creative ideas" which is a very Hipsterish thing to say and hence open to ridicule but I'm constantly in awe of the photography and art that is featured there.)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is really quite eerie - especially if you have been to the places in question. I am old enough to remember bomb damaged buildings as there were still a lot around when I was a child so I have seen the changes that can take place for myself, but the juxtaposition of the old and the new like this is quite a shock. I have often wondered if, in some parallel universe, the past is going on around us at the same time as our present and this is almost showing that. The Brandenburg Tor and the Arc de Triomph will never feel quite the same again.

I am off to look at Sergey's blog.

Anonymous said...

Bloody brilliant - I have seen them before but thanks for the reminder. I particularly like the one with the swastika flags flying.

Anonymous said...

Mrs Jones - thank you for the link to zipbag of bones. I really needed that laugh.

Debbie said...

Thanks for the links. I will be showing these to my stepfather who lived through occupation in the Netherlands. Fascinating stuff.