Once there was this guy from Amsterdam named R. C. Voogel who took a photo of a street in my neighborhood. I don’t know who he was, what he was doing there or what he found so interesting about this neighborhood. As you can see from the photo it’s an ordinary neighborhood, where mostly ordinary events are taking place.
Later on his photo was published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license on the websites of Oslo City Archives.
By accident I took a photo from the same vantage point 30 years after R.C. Voogel. I was capturing some light trails that evening and sat up my tripod and camera for a test shoot. After that the picture ended up on my hard disk where it probably would have lived a miserable life while slowly rotting away.
One day I was thinking to myself: how about seeking out some of the places at Oslobilder.no and take some new photos of the same scenes? I’ve seen similar stuff been done by other people and I think it seems like a fun project. Then, as I was looking at random, old photos from my neighborhood, I suddenly saw Voogels photo and I remembered that I have almost the exact same picture.
So, for now I didn’t actually had to seek out any places, because the photo were already there, but slowly, slowly, I will start to seek out other places in my neighborhood that has been photographed and published in the Oslo City Archives, take new photos and publish them side by side.
Enough blah, blah. Here’s my first entry for my new series “Then & Now”:
Cardinal Guzman 
Weirdly wonderful – looking forward to your new series!
Thanks. I’m planning to go for a walk and take some new photos tomorrow, then I’ll be posting more posts like this one pretty soon.
That will be a fun project. I found this post captivating; I keep going back and forth trying to see the differences, sort of like those games for kids with the two pictures and some things taken out of the second one and trying to figure out what is gone that was in the first picture.
I remember we used to play a similar game when we were kids.
Great idea! That’s so cool to look at the two photos.
Long time ago, there used to be railroad on Gotland. Someone wrote a little book about it with lots of pictures of the railroad and the stations. A friend of mine, brought the book, went to Gotland and did the same thing … took pictures from exactly the same angle — I thought that was a fun thing to do!
Yes it is. It can also be interesting for the people that’ll be around when we’re long gone. They can compare and do the same thing.
That is a great idea. The two photos don’t look that different!
No, things haven’t changed that much (at least not in these photos…).
I think it is very good idea…
Nice idea.
I always enjoy then and now shots! They present such a fantastic contrast for as simplistic a concept as it is.
There is a particular photographer whose website I once chanced upon while randomly surfing the internet. He/she helped recreate photographs 30-40 years old, with human subject.
In your photograph, apart from the new buildings, I noticed subtle changes in the bridge as well. Is that the same bridge from 30 years ago (renovated, perhaps?) or was it torn down and rebuilt?
Interesting idea, I like it!
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