The “Looking Into the Past” Photographs: Comparing and Sharing the Past

Abstract

With contemporary mediated nostalgia on the rise, it is increasingly important to identify sites of past remembrance that provide potentials for a comparative and healthy engagement with our collective and individual histories. Refracted through scholarly discourse about nostalgia, this analysis focuses on one example of potentially healthy past engagement called the “Looking Into the Past” photographs – where a photographer maps a comparatively vintage image onto a contemporary picture of the exact same locale to physically and visually compare the past to the present. A deep reading of the images' textual properties elucidates how this past engagement meme encourages a healthy use of comparative histories as opposed to mainstream media texts that tend to discourage healthy historical comparison.

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Notes on contributors

Ryan Lizardi

Ryan Lizardi is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Humanities at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. He has published articles on apocalyptic alien invasion video games, slasher horror remakes, and contemporary comic book heteronormativity, as well as a book entitled Mediated Nostalgia about how the media asks us to remember the past. E-mail: [email protected]