Shadows of the past

These remarkable photographs, via The Guardian, first appeared around the 70^th Anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings. But I’m still exploring them.

They’re interactive then-and-now photos, with the 1944 image superimposed over a current shot taken of the same location. Click on an image and drag your mouse. The 70-year old picture will fade to front, replacing the present-day one.

I can’t embed the interactive images here, so I’ll just give you a couple of them.

Mechanized hive of activity on Omaha Beach (near Colleville-sur Mer), 1944:

  

And now:

Royal Marine Commandos coming ashore on Juno Beach (I first thought they weren't wearing helmets, but on closer examination, what looked like berets probably are helmets, so, carry on, lads):

And the beach this year:

I love it that photographers went out and took pictures from the same point of view as the ones shot 70 years ago. Not recreating the image, updating it. I also love that so many of the 1944 photos show buildings and roads that have been pounded by artillery and other man-made disasters have been reconstructed and are still in use.

I come from Los Angeles, a place that famously doesn’t much care about the past and regularly rips down residential and commercial structures to build something completely different. So it pleases me to know that the French basically flipped both the Germans and the Allies the bird and rebuilt things just as they liked them.

Yeah, maybe it shows a little trace of reluctance to move on, but it works for them.

(I saw a lot of this in the parts of France that had been leveled between 1914-1918. Arras, Amiens, Verdun, Reims, Soissons: there’s a continuity to their architecture—particularly in Flanders—that is indicative of a refusal to be defined by destruction.)

And I also love that there are applications now that allow these sites to superimpose one image over the other and give the viewer the power to switch between them. Because it's so much more powerful to view the transition between past and present.

The Atlantic also has some of these photos, along with a lot more. Their interface doesn't give you quite as magical a transition, but visit their page and see if you aren’t stopped in your tracks, too.