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WINDOWS TO THE PAST
HOW FAKE PICTURES HAVE ALWAYS LIVED THE OLD TIMES.
A Project in cooperation with Jens Lindworsky.
At first it was fun - we wanted to know how our friends and we looked like before. If we had gone to a photo studio around 1900 - in a Sunday suit or in the best dress and after a visit to the hairdresser - what photos would have been made?
We had to work it out until the pictures really worked. Until the flair and the mood fit until poses and looks were authentic until the yellowing worked convincingly. In the end, we had photos that even experts could no longer distinguish from originals.
The pictures were funny, but they also had a strange magic. An effect that we had not expected. We could look at it ourselves as if we had traveled into another era, as if we had actually been there. And that has - as a side effect - changed our view of the old times. Seeing our own faces in the past has brought us closer to the past. Maybe these times are not so far away from us, not so long ago. Maybe people were not so different as the old photos make us believe.
What were those people on all the old photographs? They look serious, they never smile, they look stiff, strange and incomprehensible, as if from another world.
But let us not be fooled.
Today we laugh a lot at photos, we present ourselves young, sexy, active and optimistic. Once upon a time, another ideal applied: on photographs, one wanted to look as dignified and sublime as on a painting.
That the people in the old pictures wear their hair differently, wear old-fashioned, hand-sewn clothes and are surrounded by old things - these are outward appearances that should not distract us.
When images are black-and-white and yellowed, we instinctively sense the temporal distance and lose the connection to the photographed people. But that's misleading: the day they were in front of the lens, they were just as colorful as we were at that moment.
When we look at old portraits today, people often feel as present, close and alive as if they were starting a conversation at any moment ...
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