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.
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