This may be the coolest thing I’ve seen all week: Looking into the Past, a Flickr photo pool started by Jason E. Powell, is a collection of images that literally overlap past and present incarnations of everyday spaces. Photographers seek out archival images of a particular spot via old postcards, photographs, etc., then return to that spot, camera in hand, to capture it again, this time with the archival image held up to roughly coincide with the place where it once stood.

People are doing this to their own homes, to hospitals, rail stations and neighborhood joints, as well as to historic landmarks. Some of the most compelling and poignant examples from the pool include images of participants’ now-deceased relatives, or still-living friends and family members in younger days, superimposed over the spots where they were once photographed. When interviewed about the project in Wired U.K., Powell explained how the idea originated.

“I was searching around for a way to illustrate the phrase ‘modern-day equivalent’, and my original idea was to do a typical then/now shot, perhaps as a diptych or with some Photoshop work. After I printed the source imagery for my first test shots of my hometown from the Library of Congress, I went out to shoot the photographs and flashed on the idea of paying homage to another Flickr collection, Michael Hughes’ Souvenirs project, but only with historical imagery. Looking at the result, I immediately fell in love with it and decided to do a series of images.”

As far as I could tell, right now there are only seven contributions from Chicago or Illinois (see one of these photographs, by Chris Gansen, below; click on the image to be taken directly to Gansen’s Flickr page). If you’re a street photographer, urban planning buff, or collector of vintage postcards, why not do a little Eugene Atget-style detective work of your own and uncover the secret history of some of your favorite Chicago haunts. I’ll be looking forward to seeing what gets added to this fascinating pool of images.

Photo by Chris Gansen of Dakin and Sheridan in Lakeview, Chicago. May 29, 2009, some fifty years after the inset photo was taken.

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Claudine Isé

Claudine Isé has worked in the field of contemporary art as a writer and curator for the past decade, and currently serves as the Editor of the Art21 Blog. Claudine regularly writes for Artforum.com and Chicago magazine, and has also worked as an art critic for the Los Angeles Times. Before moving to Chicago in 2008, she worked at the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH as associate curator of exhibitions, and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as assistant curator of contemporary art, where she curated a number of Hammer Projects. She has Ph.D. in Film, Literature and Culture from the University of Southern California.

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