IN THE early years of the twentieth century, the NSW Bookstall Company – a pioneer, incidentally, of the mass-market paperback – began producing a series of picture postcards under the general heading of Past & Present. As the example below shows, a picture from the early days of the colony – based perhaps on a line drawing or an engraving – was set beside a present-day photographic image of the same scene. The postcards were popular, documenting as they did a satisfying tale of improvement, of muddy streets paved over and dark ones illuminated, of the formerly blank walls of buildings being more lately overhung with signs and awnings, behind which shops and businesses could be imagined, contributing to the general air of progress and prosperity. A similar series, called Old & New… (followed by the name of the town or city), was issued in Victoria by the stationer Robert Jolley. These early postcards show how, from its very beginnings, photography has offered a way of comparing the present with the past, of comparing the way the world looks now to the way it looked then. Not only that, but they also imply a narrative for the new country: of creativity and resilience, of a world in which things are better than they were.
The once “new” photographs from the early 1900s are now very old, but the genre of “past and present,” or “old and new”, is still with us. It is more commonly referred to these days as "then and now" or "now and then", and it is once again catching the collective imagination. In one popular variant on the traditional format, an old photograph, typically of young siblings or youthful friends, is restaged and reshot, down to the details of clothing and backdrop and facial expressions. The crucial difference is, of course, that everyone in the newer version is ten or fifteen or thirty years older, a fact of life emphasised rather than disguised by the replication of setting and props. Beginning in 2010, the Argentinian photographer Irina Werning has produced several series of photographs in this then-and-now style, which she calls Back to the Future. They have become hugely popular on the internet, and remain distinguished from the legions of similarly constructed photos, submitted to sites like Young Me/Now Me, by their greater attention to the details of art direction and composition.
It’s not entirely clear why this genre within a genre – in which we scroll through sets of images of adults behaving like children, set against images of their childish selves – can have such a hypnotic effect. Any more than it is clear what prompts a grown man to take off his clothes at the instigation of the photographer (in this case, Irina Werning for her second Back to the Future series), lie down on a rug, arch his back and mimic for the camera the expression captured in his baby photo of forty-one years earlier. It is a bit of fun, of course, and the resulting side-by-side photographs raise a smile, but there is also something unsettling about these stories of irretrievable childhoods. Missing from Werning’s photos, or from the many others that employ essentially the same method, is the confidence in progress that marks those postcards of one hundred years ago. The implied narrative that links the two photographs is not as much one of progress as regret for the disappearance of the past represented by the earlier photograph, tempered perhaps by the satisfaction of seeing how visual traces of the younger self, traces that go beyond the poses and the props, do indeed survive in the elder, and that the past may therefore not be quite so lost after all.
The contemporary fascination with then-and-now photography can be seen as part of a wider photographic trend in which the demarcation lines between films and photographs, between the moving and the still image, are becoming increasingly hard to define. In all kinds of ways, photography is highlighting its capacity to be cinematic, to suggest movement, and with it a narrative that continues over time. From the photographer’s point of view, says photographer and commentator Taylor Davidson, the trajectory is away “from ‘editing’ individual images and toward editing series of images, or in an easier-to-understand sense, toward storytelling.” In one sense this focus on storytelling is nothing new. Photographs have always told stories, and there are plenty of contemporary examples in which movement – or action, or narrative – remains, in the time-honoured way, implicit in the single, still image, but increasingly it is being made explicit; not only by the pairing or sequencing or “curating” of images to suggest a story, but also by the use of such hybrid forms as the cinemagraph and other methods of subtly animating a still image.
The possibilities for this kind of photographic storytelling now go well beyond the side-by-side format favoured in the early 1900s by the NSW Bookstall Company, or today by the creators of “young me/now me” photographs. They include photographs in which one image is superimposed on the other (old on new, or new on old), sometimes without evidence of human agency, sometimes with a hand inside the frame holding one photograph over the other. And there are photographs that have been blended and morphed and otherwise combined in ever more ingenious and seamless ways, to say nothing of creative versions of those “before and after” or “makeover” shots familiar from design magazines, or the increasingly inventive use of stop-motion and time-lapse photography.
A huge proportion of the then-and-now photographs we see today, the ones that invite us to compare one image with another, are following these newer, more inventive patterns. The Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov, for instance, has attracted a lot of attention recently with images that combine photographs from various second world war archives with his own contemporary location shots. Nazi or Soviet troops from the “original” photographs inhabit the same space as modern-day tourists (often seen with cameras around their necks), or urban citizens going about their ordinary business. “I take all the modern images myself,” says Larenkov, “because the most important part is finding the desired point to shoot… It’s very interesting to find the point where another photographer once stood. Suddenly, you see an old world with your very own eyes. You are transported back in time; it’s almost as if you’ve stepped into a time machine. Sometimes, this is scary.” By Larenkov’s definition, photography itself becomes a kind of re-enactment, an attempt to enter history not directly through the archival image but through imitating the photographer who was there before him.
IT IS a technique that has caught on. The Anne Frank Museum has produced a mobile app intended primarily for children which includes among its functions an introduction to Anne Frank’s Amsterdam by means of blended images created by the digital media organisation LBi. “It is a powerful way in which the past and present come together,” we are told, but as is the case with all such mergers of images from both the present and the past, the effect can be to keep them apart as much as to bring them together. The declared intention of these photographs is to encourage people – viewers – to journey into the past, to see Amsterdam through the eyes of Anne Frank, and to match it against what we could see now, on the same spot, with our own eyes. But the contrasts that compete within the frame, between monochrome and colour, between men in uniform and people in civilian dress, tend to highlight rather than bridge the gaps. In fact, the underlying point of then-and-now photography is that there should be a gap, a disjunction between the two component images that provides the buzz of interest and engagement.
For other kinds of then-and-now photos, the differences between the two images need to be highlighted rather than minimised. ABC Open’s Now and Then project, which ran from 2010 to 2012, invited contributors from regional Australia to send in images in which an old or vintage photograph is held up and rephotographed against a latter-day view of the same scene. Whatever the similarities between the two photographs, what counts is the change, because change is what delivers the story. But it is a fine line, because if the change has been too great, if there are no longer any clear markers from the original, the entire point evaporates. There are no links to make a story. The objective is not simply to recover the past, but also to reflect on what has happened since, and to make connections. Rephotography is a form of re-enactment, and it is the process of re-enactment, rather than merely looking, that provides a key to understanding. “By holding a historical image in its present day location and rephotographing it, you can create a window into past events and the lives of people who’ve stood on the same ground as you,” says a contributor to the site. This is photography defined as a warm medium, one that draws you in and changes your perceptions of yourself and your neighbours.
Inspired by the Flickr group Looking Into the Past, the project has gone on to inspire local communities to mount exhibitions of their photographed history and its relation to the present day, in centres from Hay to Hobart, Wagga to Warrnambool. The ABC’s own exhibition of then-and-now photographs, selected from public submissions to series 1 and 2 of the project, was mounted at the Museum of Sydney in 2012 and has recently been seen at the gallery of the Newcastle Region Library. The project’s top contributor, Pete Smith from Metford in the Hunter Valley, has spoken of his enthusiasm for the project, and for the way in which it prompted him to revisit and sort through the family’s store of photographs taken by his grandfather, selecting some superbly evocative examples with which to begin the process of rephotographing the past. “When I saw how my first now-and-then photo turned out, I felt really connected with the image that my grandfather had taken,” says Smith. “Before the Now and Then project these photos were just photos, they didn’t sort of have another dimension. Using this method, it brings them to life again.” By superimposing the past on the present, “you can see into the past.”
This is a common theme among practitioners and admirers of this form of photography: the image that results from holding an older photograph up in front of the original location, and capturing the visual conjunction in a second, composite image, is the route to understanding the past, and is presented as more successful and more satisfying than, for instance, the less technologically driven act of examining the vintage photo in isolation and imagining your way into it. The method emphasises the nostalgia inherent in looking at old photographs, and indeed the overriding impression that comes from contemplating a group of twenty-first-century now-and-then photos, like those that make up the ABC project, is one of loss, or regret for a simpler time. (The Chilean-born, New York–based Camilo José Vergara, widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the art of rephotography, describes himself on his website Tracking Time as “an archivist of decline.”) An Eden contributor to the ABC project, Peter Whiter, makes that sense of decline and loss eloquently explicit: the practice of rephotography reminds him of “how shameful it was for us to lose [Eden’s] Customs House built in 1848, demolished to make way for the Mobil fuel depot… Thankfully the hideous tanks are gone… but worst of all we lost a signature building.” Similarly, a photograph showing Les Lewis from Hay waterskiing down Lachlan Street after a heavy rain storm, taken by local photographer Gavin Johnston in the sixties and rephotographed by an anonymous contributor, includes the laconic note that the original image was taken “outside the Hiberian Hotel which was burnt down.”
BUT the optimism apparent in the NSW Bookstall Company’s postcards of one hundred years ago is not altogether absent from these more recent comparisons of past and present. A now-and-then photograph submitted to the ABC Open project by members of Hunter–Central Rivers Catchment Management shows an image of a derelict building – the schoolmaster’s house on Ash Island in the Lower Hunter River – overlaid on a latter-day rendition of the same building, now fully restored, including “its cedar doors and architraves, baltic pine ceilings, tallowwood floors, and Italian marble fireplaces.” The image is disconcerting at first because we have come to expect, as viewers, that the narrative of these composite photographs will be one of decline, yet here we see the ruined building as belonging to the past, and the pristine one as belonging to the present. Perhaps because it works against these expectations, it is somehow less convincing as a composite. It is the older, tumbledown version of the building that holds centre stage and sticks in our minds.
Then-and-now photographs can, like the one showing the rehabilitation of the house on Ash Island, be created by placing one image on top of another, larger one, and photographing the result. But the methodology preferred by the ABC project is to physically hold the old photograph up in front of the original location, and snap. This can be tricky, because the photographer is also having to concentrate on lining up the two elements so that the “markers” – the things that the two scenes have in common – match as accurately as possible. (“This is really hard,” concedes the ABC’s tip-sheet, “if you’re trying to hold the camera in one hand and the photograph in the other!”) There’s another option, but that creates more problems with lining up your markers: “you could get a second person to hold the photograph, but you’ll have to direct them carefully for positioning.” What this means, whether it is the photographer’s hand or a friend’s holding the older photograph, is that the final image has a winningly low-spec, low-tech quality to it, the hand holding the photo an overt and deliberate visual reminder of the presence and personality of the photographer, and the part he or she is playing in linking the present with the past.
In contrast to this (literally) hands-on quality, other then-and-now photographers are taking full advantage of technical innovation – sleight of hand, if you like – to highlight and dramatise the contrast between old and new, between before and after. Various clever means of transitioning or “sliding” or eliding one image into another, (methods which in many cases have roots that extend far back into the history of photography and more particularly of cinema), are deployed to establish both connection and contrast between present and past. In a Photography Then and Now series recently introduced by the Guardian newspaper, “you can leap through time as if by magic. Tap or click on the [historical] image to reveal the modern view, and drag or swipe to control the speed of its transformation.” The overall impact is different from that of viewing the two images side-by-side, or looking at a then-and-now photograph in which one image has been superimposed on another. Instead we watch as the first image, at a speed designated by us, slides into the second.
A purist might say that the sliding adds little, that the story is already there, in the individual photographs and in the viewer’s act of comparing them, and that to create a sense of movement and the passing of time by eliding one into the other is superfluous and even distracting. The Czech photojournalist Jan Langer embarked on a project, culminating in an exhibition held earlier this year in Vienna, in which he photographed, individually and in black-and-white, a group of centenarians, and compared his version of them with studio portraits taken in their youth. Langer shows the photographs side by side on his website, but they can also be seen in a format that blends the past and present images together. By means of a wipe effect, for instance, we can move a vertical bar back and forth across the frame, revealing more or less of the subject’s younger and older selves as one appears to grow out of and then subsume the other. We can stop the bar in the middle of the frame to create a composite portrait of young and old, a technique which probably now qualifies as a photographic genre in its own right, rather than a mere sub-branch of then-and-now photography. Yet in the end it is the stillness of the two photographs, placed side by side, that invites us to imagine the story of what happened in between. The process of eliding the two – the old photo of the young subject with the new photo of the old one – speeds up any biography we might imagine, and turns a 100+ life into a kind of instant makeover.
Whatever form it takes, then-and-now photography can be seen not just as a way of understanding history via a third party – photography – but also as a response to the problem of originality, of how to be new in an overcrowded and intensely competitive field. It is a problem that is probably starker in the practice of photography than in any other branch of the creative arts. A photographic idea, an idea like the one of combining younger and older selves into a single image, is no sooner thought of than copied, often within nanoseconds, making it impossible to establish who thought of it first. Then-and-now photography tries to bypass this disappointing fact by openly conceding originality to the earlier photograph. Instead it takes as its real subject the contemporary photographer’s response to that originality, of trying to see things as someone else saw them while knowing that the image – of the face, the street, the trees – can never be replicated, because time has moved on. Meanwhile, we as viewers are invited to fill in the spaces in between. •
