Blending fiction and reality, art and history, this series of superimpositions takes ‘then-and-now’ imagery all the back to the 18th Century on the streets and rivers of England’s capital city. Most of the added classics (spliced with Google Street View shots) are largely unedited, a few are strategically cropped but many show a naturally stark contrast in colors, tones, lighting, and of course: street life.

Collected and collaged by Halley Docherty, these hybrids show historical structures in their built environments like St. Martin in the Fields, shown at the top (painting by William Logsdail in 1888), a church situated on the opposite side of Trafalgar Square to Northumberland House, pictured directly below (painted by Canaletto in 1752 and since demolished).

Various views of the River Thames show how the riverfronts, skylines, ships and boats and shifted in type and number over time, or highlight key points and storytelling scenes of local history set against the everyday backdrop captured by Street View vans.

Many major streets are shown at least partly as they were, albeit with some embellishments or artistic license here and there, as well as the vehicles and people that populated them (just surrounded by contemporary persons and contexts).

Other paintings shown in this collection include: A View of Greenwich from the River by Canaletto (1750–52), Blackman Street London by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1885), View of The Grand Walk by Canaletto (1751), The 9th of November, 1888 by William Logsdail (1890), The Strand Looking East from Exeter Exchange by Anonymous (1822), Covent Garden Market by Balthazar Nebot (1737), The River Thames with St. Paul’s Cathedral on Lord Mayor’s Day by Canaletto (1746) and Westminster Abbey with a Procession of Knights of the Bath by Canaletto (1749).

Almost everything we once kept at our desks is now packed into our personal computers, but rarely is this phenomena so brilliantly illustrated as in the beautiful video below.

This decades-long transition from the tangible to the digital is shown by the Harvard Innovation Lab as a migration of individual physical items into their corresponding virtual equivalents, desktop icons replacing their counterparts one by one, “demonstrating the steep shift from cork boards and fax machines to pinterest and PDFs.”

Lest you think it is all misdirection or illusion, “the scene is set with actual vintage items sourced by the team of photographers and entrepreneurs: the Macintosh classic, corded phone, fax machine, globe, corkboard, Polaroid camera, and Rolodex were all purchased through individual sellers on ebay, while the rest of the items were found abandoned an unused in basements and at garage sales. While some argue that technology has made our lives more complex, the video below demonstrates the current clarity from clutter, and the ways in which technology encourages productive and social behavior.”

Whether the conclusions match the experiment is subjective (some of us might miss our stuff), but what prompted this ambitious exploration of technological revolutions? The project creators “wondered what it would be like to recreate the desktop from the 1980s and then emulate its transformation through the computer age, to illustrate how technology has changed our world, un-cluttering our desks and simplifying our lives. While gradual change from year to year is often hard to perceive, a longer snapshot gives us a much more dramatic view of the technological progression we have experienced.” The video was produced by Momchil Filev of BestReviews.com with photography by DougThomsen.tv and engineering by Anton Georgiev.

We tend to notice as buildings come and go, skylines change and grow with planning and oversight, but what about the spray-painted wall art the adorns the sides of these structures, sometimes persistent but often fragile and ephemeral?

OldWalls, a project by Alberto Boido, documents past and present layers of street graffiti, meticulously tracking the artists responsible for the works as well, whenever possible. Most of the pairs are taken from the same vantage point, first in the 1990s, then again in the 2010s.

Sometimes, the creators in question are famous (or infamous) local creators either adding their mark or being painted over. The above murals in Milan were made more recently by the well-known Italian artist Blu, but the walls,  as you can see, were originally covered in the 1990s. Other artists featured here include Robx, Prof Bad Trip, Maox, Inox, Kino, Bach, Zoc, Kalimero, Kayone, Yazo, Loze, Kid, Zen, Airone, Krema, Steezo, Teatro, Mec and Oze.

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Street Art Decades Apart 40 Then Now Graffiti Photos

It is one thing to see a building in a state of disrepair and imagine what it would have been like when it was occupied and vibrant. It is quite another to overlay a photograph, taken from the precise same spot, bringing into sharp focus the difference a day, week, month, year or decade can make.

DetroitUrbex takes documentation to new depths (and heights) in this series of collages that show historical use and present conditions in abandoned structures through the lens of students and teachers overlaid with the haunting shots of an urban explorer.

The hybrid results span decades, including a combination of more-recent color photographs and archival black-and-white ones, capturing ordinary activities and everyday people and putting them in a strange and haunting context.

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Then Now Hybrid Images Of Deserted Buildings In Detroit