Now and Then
1. Using archive photographs in Holocaust sites.
2. Using archive photographs in other historic locations.
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1. Using archive photographs in Holocaust sites
During a study visit to Krakow, Poland, the Imperial War Museum team set this photo-activity for the group. Great fun, a few excursions with bemused traffic and a deal of enlightenment resulted. Good stuff. Could work anywhere, any topic.
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The notes reflect on the concept of 'Now and Then' some of the wider issues of archive photographs, how people react to cameras and images, the Holocaust and photo-imagery and the nature of photography itself - 'Now and Then' - Download Here.
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Photo Activity
Students were given archive photographs - potcard size-ish - taken in an area - in this case the Ghetto area in Krakow - which we explored to find matches of the photo with the location as it is today.
Hold up the archive photo at arms length(ish) and try and align it with the actuality and take a new photograph. MInd the traffic!
The Ghetto Gate 'rebuilt' - Krakow, 2008. Original photograph 1941.
USHMM Photo Archive has several photographsof the same gate. See Photographs 73170, 73170A, 73171 and 73172.
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Comparing old and new has always been a fascinating activity - a way of measuring our lives. What changes can we see? What caused them? What stories rise out of this simple time machine? For more recent events where does our memory reach on the timeline drawn between the two and for more distant events how do we reach beyond memory?
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Krakow, October 2008 Krakow, March 1943
In this instance the buildings in the photograph matched well with how they are today on the dominant right-hand side of the image though, as is often the case with this exercise, you can't quite reach to the points of convergence on both sides at once due to the differences in cameras and lenses.
However, what has happened in addition to the matching is that the rest of the student group, on the left-hand pavement, have become, in the new photograph, observers of the scene of 70 years ago; they are caught by the camera as time-traveling bystanders of the events of 1943.
The Archive photo is: “Column of Jews march with bundles down a main street in Krakow during the liquidation of the ghetto. SS guards oversee the deportation action.” Date: Mar 1943 Locale: Krakow, Poland. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Instytut Pamieci Narodowe. Photograph #06694 Looking upthe USHMM website you will find other photographs of Jewish people being marched in columns away from the Ghettos in Krakow, Lodz and other cities. What's the same - what different... plot them on a map ... all these columns of people being marched across Europe.
BTW: The thumb/hand holding the archive photo has been magic’d away in this example.
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In this instance the archive photo matched exactly. Hold it up and it simply covered the scene perfectly - line for line, angle for angle. So we just added it in the corner for reference.
Is this a case where half a photo would be better than one? Or perhaps simply placing the photographs side by side. There was another one of the Ghetto gates in the background across where the tree is now growing.
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... on-site photographic displays ...
The use of on-site photographs is an increasing experience when visting heritage and historical sites. Placing large images, with accompanying text, near to the actual location - turn your head - now and then - then and now.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau site has a number including this one behind 'Cremetoria 3 and 4' - a bare area of ground surrounded on two sides by a corner of the perimeter fence. It was here in 1944, that bodies were burnt in open-air pits when the pressure of numbers was too great for the crematoria to cope, and it was here that members of the SonderKommando team took photographs using a hidden camera and smuggled film. The photographs, known as the Sonderkommando photographs' , are a direct visual witness of mass murder happening at Auschwitz. The photographs are placed so you can stand and see photograph and location together in one view.
Photo: James Fanning, 2007.
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2. Using archive photographs in historic locations.
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Flickr: The Commons
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Michael Hughes model photos.
By way of a different sort of example that might relate to other topics here's a look at the 'Souvenir' project. Photographer Michael Hughes has an on-going project in which he holds model souvenirs of well known tourist icons - Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Abbey Road, Taj Mahal (the one in India), etc – up in front of the real one before taking the picture. Matching a model is usually a bit different than matching a photograph but both are tricky enough to be stimulating and with some great outcomes.
:: Eiffel Tower
In these images of New York, Hughes uses archive photographs. Taken in 2005 from a New York ferry with black and white postcards made in 1999 showing the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers - 9/11 occurred in 2001:
:: New York
:: New York
See also
:: MIchael Hughes Flickr site
:: Daily Mail story
:: Michael Hughes website
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Statue of Liberty
:: THEN - Statue of Liberty - 1883
:: NOW - The Statue of Liberty - 2007
:: the construction of the Statue of Liberty in New York. - 13 images sof the construction fron New York Public Library. These are beautifully photographs - delicate in their representation and great deatil of such an enormous undertaking and gigantic piece of scultpure and engineering.
:: About the Statue of Liberty - from Wikipedia with more 'education use' images.
A few years ago it was quite difficult to get a set of images of the Statue of Liberty showing its construction and history for 'education use'. Today due to the combined efforts of searchable publishing services, citizen-photographers, public archives and copyleft licences the knowledge and materials are being freely shared to a much greater extent. Hooray! The amount of provenance infomation about the images is also increasing, particularly from archive sources - rest of us take note - compared with the 'illustration' of typical printed and early web media sources.
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Eugène Atget and Tom Gore - Paris a hundred years apart
Eugène Atget was a French photographer you took hundreds of wonderful images of Paris - streets, courtyards, parks, shop windows - over the final thirty years of his life - 1890 until 1927. The photographs were taken with a glass, plate camera and have a timeless yet prescient quality - utter stillness in which light might open up or close down and something might happen or might have happened - like films without time. The German writer Walter Benjamin said Atget's images “operate beyond ostensible purpose, appearing unintentional, but uncannily like the scene of a crime. Atget's work became popular after his death and he was influential on the Surrealist artists and on photographers ever since.
Since 1988, Tom Gore has walked around Paris re-photographing the locations used by Eugène Atget and later published them as pairs of now and then images on Flickr creating a ravishing set of mindscapes. Hurry now to Atget's Paris by Tom Gore. In this photo-pair cars have replaced the handcarts and the complete wall of posters - including one for a photographer - has given way to a few hand bills and a scrawl of grafitti at head-height.
Gore also introduces us to the work of another French photographer Charles Marville who photographed Paris before it's modernisation by Baron Haussmann in the 1850's and 60's... earlier than Atget.
More information on Eugène Atget - 1857-1927 - and his photographs:
:: Oh joy of joys! - Geroge Eastman House has published a set of Eugène Atget’s photographs on Flickr Commons. Eugène Atget on The Commons
... and ...
:: About Eugène Atget on Wikipedia
:: About Eugène Atget on Masters of Photography
:: the full George Eastman House collection
:: more photographs by Atget fans in 'Atget Revisted'.
and
:: About Charles Marville
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... then ... now ... pending ...
Not so long ago the firestation stood in Hebden Bridge. Last - week - July 09 - it was demolished. What will replace it?
The nearest firestation is now in Mythenroyd and serves the area of the Upper Calder Valley and its towns and villages.
Photos. Mateer
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Tate's Google Streetview 'Then and Now' project
Tate (Gallery) is running phase one of a project called Art Map to create an interactive experience linking thousands of paintings in its collections to online maps using Goole Streetview. Tate has set up 17 example images with paintings by, for instance, Turner and Constable, and featuring cities throughout the UK. See examples of now an then with images, map locations and views of the location today:
:: 'The Burning of the Houses of Parliament' - by JMW Turner. 1834/5 and what it looks like today.
:: An Iron Works in Wales by Graham Sutherland. 1941/2 and the location today.]]
:: 17 example images to explore ...
:: About the project and how to join in ...
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Gregory's Girl - now and then
Cumbernauld at the time of the film, made in 1981, and now, 2009. A really well constructed 'now and then' project by Flickr enthusiast Route9Autos.
There are 26 paired images showing many of the main exterior locations in the film - see them on Flickr at Gregory's Girl
:: IMDB lists many of the locations by name. GG locations
:: About Gregory's Girl Wikipedia.
:: About Gregory's Girl IMDB.
Image pairing: Route99Autos on Flickr - with permission
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Seeing the future coming ...
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Commons on Maps for iPhone & iPod: Nov 2009
Version 1.1 of Indicommons for iPhone and iPod Touch is now available in the Apple App Store, and you want it - because like us, you love maps. The Indicommons app now shows the location of any geotagged Commons photo on a ma - perfect for hunting for that Then & Now location.
:: More info
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... and finally ...
Not quite the same thing - but some people do have very large cameras and printers to play with :-)
This is the front of the Imperial War Museum in London which is having a make-over so they've covered up the on-going work with this huge photo of what it used to look like and what it will look like after the refurbishment.
The entrance is cut away so you can still climb up the steps and go inside. The real pillars and the photo pillars match quite well. The yellow cones are shell cases that go with the two huge guns that sit in front of the building.
It's a sort of Then and the Future with the Now bit more or less hidden.
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Acknowledgements
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This webpage by Marshall Mateer was first published on 2nd July 2009. Recent updates: Atget story 28th July and Hebden Bridge and Tate 'Art map' stories Aug 2009; Sonnderkommando story Sept 2009
The first version of the notes was written as part of a report for the IWM Holocaust Education Fellowship 2008. The document on this page is Version 3.
:: Feedback to info@shapesoftime.net
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Shapes of Time
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