Jason Powell went to the US Capitol recently to photograph not the politicians, the architecture or the tourists. He went to photograph a photograph.
The scene taking a second turn in front of the lens was one worth revisiting 70 years later: a bevy of beautiful California girls dressed to represent the state’s fruit crops. They smiled from the Capitol steps in a photo discovered in the recesses of the Library of Congress online photo archive. The caption identified them as a “cornucopia” participating in a 1939 publicity event with Senator Sheridan Downey to spur the construction of a highway from San Diego. Powell printed it, took it to the Capitol and stood there amid the tourist commotion, trying to figure out exactly where those California beauties posed.
Powell’s photo in a photo is also a moment within a moment. It’s his way of briefly connecting what was captured in the milliseconds of a camera’s aperture opening decades ago with the place it happened in the present day.
For his Web photo series “Looking Into the Past,” Powell takes his photographs of photographs with a wide-angle lens so that when he holds up a photo from years ago, his camera takes in the present-day setting as well. When he’s able to perfectly align the image with the contemporary scene, it’s either a neat parlor trick, a portal through time or both. His work has gone viral on Reddit, Digg and other social media sites.
“I’m the type of person who would walk down the street and wonder what it was like 100 years ago,” Powell said.
Powell, of suburban Reston, Virginia, began his photographic time travel unintentionally, in February 2009. He had planned to do a typical then-and-now diptych with Library of Congress images of suburban Leesburg, Virginia, but when he held the image in front of his camera to check his perspective, he had the idea to just keep the photo there.
Powell didn’t invent the photo-within-a-photo technique as archaeologists commonly use “Prince’s Principle” to document changes in historic sites.
The most interesting thing about his photos isn’t seeing what has changed — it’s seeing what has stayed the same. Some of the trees in his photos are the same ones from decades ago, only taller and stronger. Statues in traffic circles, unaltered, are a reminder of the permanence of monuments in a rapidly changing urban landscape. Although some buildings remain, many have been replaced with the wearying office buildings that fill so many blocks in Washington.
In the era of the present-day blah-building, there’s also contemporary blah-photography. Although more photos are being taken than ever before, many are uninspired. That’s why vintage photography — or simulated digital imitations — is getting a second look in projects such as Powell’s.
“Shorpy,” a straightforward curated site of historic photos from the Library of Congress, was one of the first. The site “My Daguerreotype Boyfriend” examines the attractiveness of gentlemen from bygone eras, and “Awkward Family Photos” has specialized in collecting Olan Mills photo studio shots from the 1980s.
Photographer Irina Werning’s “Back to the Future” photo series puts adults in the same poses and outfits of their side-by-side childhood shots. And Instagram and Hipstamatic, two iPhone camera apps, make any image shot with an iPhone look as if it were taken on a vintage camera instead.
The sites that don’t cull from readers’ personal photos rely heavily on the Library of Congress’s online catalogue, which contains hundreds of thousands of images. Many are old enough that their copyright has expired, allowing anyone to use them. Beverly Brannan, curator of documentary photography, said the library did not officially keep tabs on the sites that used the photos, but she’s a fan of sites such as “Looking Into the Past” and “My Daguerreotype Boyfriend.”
“It seems to me that lots of people don’t have a good sense of history anymore, so to bring these pictures to people’s attention and to discuss them with facts, and put them in context, it’s very educational in a painless way,” Brannan said. “I think all of us are history buffs, and we really enjoy this way of going back in time, going forward in time and learning more about what we’re seeing.”
Taylor Jones saw his first photo-within-a-photo in May, after finding a photo of his younger brother at the same kitchen table where Jones was sitting. But in the three months since, his Web site, “Dear Photograph,” has become a viral sensation. He recently signed a book deal with HarperCollins. His site reflects a nostalgia for film from a generation of photographers that has grown up shooting primarily digital.
“I think because everything’s becoming so digital now, that physical photographs — actual pictures — are so cool to look at,” Jones said. “It’s the fascination that people have with old trends becoming new … we wish we could live in that old age when there wasn’t any technology.”
Jones, 22, said this wistfully, but it’s hard to believe he means it because he was able to capture these images with technology, and because of the Internet, he was able to share them. And when he’s not working on “Dear Photograph,” he’s a social media manager for a technology company in Waterloo, Ontario.
“It’s ironic, but it’s using digital electronics to give people a window into the past, so it works out,” he said.
Powell has played around with Hipstamatic and Instagram, but he eschews fake vintage-effect photography for authentic antique photos. When he browses the Library of Congress’s online archive, he’s looking not only for architecture that anchors the scene to the present day, but also for intrigue.
“I have to do a ‘spray and pray,’ where I’m going through an entire collection,” said Powell — clicking through thousands of photos to find just a few shots.
Powell, who recently left a job as a network engineer, is working on a “Looking Into the Past” book. He considers himself to be equal parts historian and artist and is beginning a series of photos of Civil War battlefields and will travel to the precise sites where photographers stood for each of the historic photos.
“This is a documentation of me being here,” he said.
The Washington Post
Posts
Post a Comment