thenandnow

Photographer Steve Birnbaum has been recreating music history by photographing images of musicians and bands in the exact location where they were originally photographed. The project started in 2010, and since then, he has covered 500 to 600 locations shooting from 100 to 150 days in a year.

The day after photography was invented in 1839, somebody pointed out that the photographs were just shades of gray – there was no color. The photography inventors knew this was a problem and probably hoped that no one would notice. Paintings were in vivid color and if photography was ever to compete with painting, there needed to be some color in them.

Every place in the world has a history. To understand it in the present you need some knowledge of its past. The history of the earth can be read from its rocks; the history of life, from the evolutionary histories and relationships of its species.

British photographer Chris Porsz tirelessly tracked down local people he photographed roughly 40 years ago and recreated his decades-old street photos of them. The fascinating then-and-now photos are part of his ongoing series Reunions.

The Brisbane Water National Park on the Central Coast of Australia is such a beautiful place to be, and Somersby Falls is one of the most popular destinations. It’s not hard to see why. So when I stumbled across a 108-year-old picture of one of my favorite waterfalls in the park, I and decided to try and recreate it to see what had changed, and what had stayed the same.

It was, for most of them, the first happy time in their lives, and for some, the last and only. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as part of his New Deal, penned the Civilian Conservation Corps into existence. Its primary goal was job creation: young men, aged 17-28, could sign up to work as unskilled laborers, usually on projects to develop the nation’s national parks and forests.

To mark 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we revisited the precise locations of 10 memorable photos taken when half of the city lay behind the Iron Curtain.

Want to see how the city of San Francisco has transformed over the past century? Here's a neat set of then-and-now photos showing old shots of The City by the Bay next to modern pictures shot in the same locations.

Emmy-award winning filmmaker and talk show host Tammy Tuckey has visited Walt Disney World over 15 times starting in 1998. During their latest 6 days there, the family recreated over 100 photos and videos from their memories over the past 2 decades. What resulted is this heartwarming 4-minute then-and-now music video titled "Remember the Magic" (with Tuckey herself covering the Disney song).

My name is Phalgun Polepalli, and I'm a professional wedding photographer in Bangalore, India. After losing my dad exactly 20 years ago in a tragic car accident, I recently did a personal photo project that helped me reconnect with him. On my father's 70th birthday anniversary, I retracted his footsteps in Paris.

Here's a beautiful then-and-now photo that shows a bride and groom on their wedding day in the exact same pose as when they received their first holy communion as children decades ago.

Back in December 2015, photographer Kevin McElvaney visited Turkey and Greece to document scenes of the ongoing refugee crisis. Wondering how things have changed over the past year and a half, McElvaney decided to revisit the exact same locations in June 2017 to rephotograph them.

It's always fascinating when comparisons are made between modern day cities and their days gone by. In this split-screen comparison by The New Yorker, footage from the 1930s in New York has been recreated to reflect the modern day reality.

Until the release of the 500-yen coin in 1982, its corresponding paper equivalent reigned for more than 40 years in Japan. In fact, it wasn’t until 1994 that the 500-yen banknote was finally withdrawn from circulation.

Then-and-now photo recreations have become extremely popular online over the past several years. Especially with rephotographed family photos from decades past, the concept offers a fascinating look at how people have changed over the years.

Starting about 40 years ago, photographer Chris Porsz began shooting street portraits of strangers he met in his hometown of Peterborough in England. For the past few years, Porsz has been tracking down those subjects and asking them to pose for recreations of those decades-old photos. The ambitious project is titled Reunions.

The New Yorker recently had an interesting idea. They asked filmmaker Kevin McAlester to recreate a 70-year-old drive through downtown Los Angeles—a then and now video that shows just how much the city has changed since the 1940s.

"Tilbakeblikk" ("retrospective" in Norwegian) is a fascinating photo project that shows how Norway's gorgeous landscapes have changed over the past century. Decades-old photos are faithfully re-captured by figuring out exactly where the original photographer stood.

For its 2015 Poppy Appeal campaign to raise support for current and former British military personnel, the The Royal British Legion commissioned a beautiful photo project that recreates studio portraits of World War I military personnel with modern day serving and ex-service men and women.

The city of Detroit, Michigan has gone through huge economic and demographic changes over the past century. Once a booming car-making city with 1.85 million residents back in the 1950s, the beaten-down city had just 700,000 in 2013.

Hungarian photographer and retoucher Flora Borsi wanted to capture the city's challenges in images, so she combined vintage photos from 1900s with modern day pictures she made on recent visits.

Earlier this month, Reddit user magic976's parents celebrated their 40th anniversary as husband and wife. To mark the occasion, they decided to recreate two photos from their wedding day back in 1975.

"Then and now" photo projects are all the rage these days, but the video above puts a unique spin on the idea. It's titled "Yesterday's Tomorrow: A Portland Journey," and is a magical tour of Portland, Oregon, with vintage photographs weaved into modern day video of different places in the city.

For the past two years, photographer Jordan Liles has been researching the life and work of George Bradford Brainerd, a lesser-known 19th-century photographer who shot 2,500 photos of New York before he died in 1887 at the age of 42.

Starting in 2013, Liles has also been visiting the locations of Brainerd's photos -- some of the oldest surviving images of New York -- recreating the shots to show how New York has changed over the past 140 years.

"Seven Generations of American Women" is a project by Los Angeles-based photographer Christine McConnell in which she recreated her family portraits going back 200 years. The series starts with her great-great-great-grandmother and ends in the present day.

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Back in November 2013, an EF4 tornado tore through Illinois, killing several people and destroying hundreds of homes. Photojournalists at the Journal Star in Peoria, Illinois captured numerous photographs documenting the devastation from both the ground and the air.

Last month, at the one year anniversary of the disaster, those same photojournalists went out and rephotographed those same scenes. The resulting before-and-after photos document the process the community has made in rebuilding their lives.

Route 66 is a famous highway that crosses the United States, connecting Santa Monica, California on the west with Chicago, Illinois toward the east. It was one of the original highways of the US Highway System.

The route is also the subject of a project by photographer Natalie Slater, titled "The Mother Road Revisited." Slater found old photos of the route from decades ago and rephotographed them as they appear today.

Then & Now style photo series are anything but uncommon, but what if the "then" you want to compare to "now" happened before the invention of photography? You would think that would be a deal-breaker, but one computer graphics manager and gaming enthusiast found a way around this issue.

For his 'Then & Now' series, Damien Hypolite printed out screenshots from the game Assassin's Creed Unity -- which is based during the French Revolution -- and then went around holding them up against modern-day Paris.

This video is a "then-and-now" comparison showing the Dutch city of Alkmaar in 1914 and in 2014. It was created by Dutch photographer Frits de Beer, Tara Rikkers and Michael de Vreugd, Alkmaar natives who wanted to see how his city had changed over the past 100 years.

Timera 2 is the second iteration of a rather unique then-and-now compositing app that crowdsources photographs from around the globe and allows you to easily document the changes that have taken place in the world around you over the decades.

Through a massive user-generated database of historical images, appropriately geotagged to their location, Timera users can create unique then-and-now photos by overlaying the archive photo with a photo they just took.

Always fascinated by the then and now series that make their way across the Web, photographer Samantha Decker wanted to give it a shot herself. The thing was, she didn't want to do the exact same thing everyone else was doing.

That's how she settled on a reality-altering series by the name of Now & Then: Seeing the Future from the Past.