Then and now
Ever since I read Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn I’ve been a sucker for then-and-now pictures of cities and buildings. Via The Online Photographer , I stumbled on a slideshow of work by Christopher Rauschenberg at The Morning News consisting of Rauschenberg’s captures of Paris scenes taken by Atget. (I’m also a big Atget fan – so this was doubly great.) There’s also a link to an earlier then-and-now series at TMN of New York.
posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 9:36 am
I liked the Rauschenberg slideshow. But the big thing for me is how little had changed.
[...] tip: Crooked Timber) [...]
The big thing for me was how almost all the ‘then’ photographs had a handcart posed in front of their buildings. Were there just lots of handcarts littered around olde-worlde Paris? Or did Ruaschenberg push around his own prop handcart to bling-up his pictures?
I like such comparisons, too, although I agree with Otto that these photos are more similar than I would have expected. Notice the prevalence of graffiti in the more recent pictures though, sad.
After living in Geneva for a year, I bought a book like this. (Genève: Passé Et Présent Sous Le Même Angle) The contrasts there were more pronounced. And I think one could go back today and redo those photos and still find yet more changes. Even just in the decade since I’ve lived there, there has been considerable change, I think much of it as the city has dealt with public transportation and adjusting the circulation of traffic. Of course, this might not change the architecture per se, but it’s not necessarily trivial for the layout of streets and other public areas.
[...] Via Crooked Timber fant jeg et slideshow fra The Morning News med fotografier der Christopher Rauschenberg har tatt [...]
Very cool. I have to say that Paris appears to have been ‘unimproved’ less than New York. But I think the apparent decline (or at least the feeling that the life has been sucked out of many of the scenes) is an illusion of the exercise being inherently biased in favor of the past and against the present.
The past photographer chose the locations and angles because they were interesting or picturesque (at least relative to other options nearby). The present photographer doesn’t have the option of comparing modern beauty to past ugliness, since obviously nobody in the past went around systematically photographing scenes that were ugly or nondescript (or empty) in 1910 but would show the modern Paris or New York to best advantage.
Oh, How Buildings Learn is such a great, underappreciated book that has so many extra-architectural applications.