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Artist Photoshops Scenes From WWII Into Present Day
Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov has taken old World War II photos and photoshopped them over the locations in present day. The scenes from places like Prague, Vienna, and Moscow are incredibly well done and a neat way to appreciate history.
Hm, js app, with a slider, to transition between two images & with some areas of each image (people for example) given early prominence during transition to "their" version of the photo? Sound like something a slashdotter could do... ;)
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A lot seperates us between now and then. Countless dead, every family across the planet touched by it. Nobody on this planet has a family that was untouched by that war. Absolutely Everyone lost someone in that war.
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Disclaimer: I'm not defending the GP.
It doesn't matter that it is technically rather simple to perform, many great works of art are not necessarily difficult in technique, but their value comes from the unique and meaningful perspective of the artist. In this particular case, I have to say that these are some of the most inspired, evocative, and meaningful photo manipulations I have ever seen or am ever likely to see.
Perhaps this is most meaningful photo-manipulation you'll ever see... but I really doubt that's true. The photoshopping here is amateurish, and a detriment, I think, to what could be a very powerful set of artwork. Had the artist managed to blend together the photographs to create a single imagine, rather than two rather obviously layered images, the "ghosts of the past" effect would be much more striking. The artist could have conveyed much more subtle and penetrating messages.
Take this image for example. The impact here is seeing these WWII soldiers walking down an otherwise modern street. A technically proficient photo editor would not have, for example, cut off the legs of the foremost soldier, nor allowed the soldiers in the distance to the right fade out. On top of that, I think it would have been much more striking if the present showed through the past as well - the soldiers on the sidewalk passing by modern road signs, for instance. A similar kind of modification would have transformed this image from intriguing to shocking. The image that comes closest to successfully blending the past and present is this image, except for the tree on the right that fazes out, and the poor blending with the sky.
On the other hand, this image came very close to being absolutely striking, but the decision to partially fade out the car the soldiers are walking by is a tragic mistake. If the car were fully present, the soldiers would look like they were walking around the cars in the parking lot - conveying a powerful message that we tend to move history around our conveniences, rather than respect the weight of the ages. Similarly, this image would have been visually and emotionally arresting, if the artist had been willing to let the flag poles stay in the foreground rather than blend away and back again; and had taken more care with the soldier's legs, and the hard edges in between the second and third pole.
As they are now, these photographs do draw attention to the history of places, and are a worth a look. They are not, however, art-gallery material. And the key difference is not the artistic ambition, but the lack of technical ambition.
Naturally, this is all my artistic opinion, and I understand that we might have different tastes. I just want to emphasize that technical proficiency , or lack thereof, can make or break art... and I think it broke it in this case. If this artist is comfortable handing his work off to a master printmaker, I think this body of work could turn into something really powerful.
Here is an example of some less serious but way better done manipulations of historic photos. Seriously, check this stuff out.
I lived near "A bridge to far" and in some movies, that is very eary. You realize your house is one of the landing fields. But then, I used to often go past a spot in the woods were if you went of the bicycle path a little bit, down, there was a small monument were people were killed by the germans.
If a german asks the way, I point them in the wrong direction. It is how I was raised. I might be silly after so many decades, but it is better then forgetting.
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The problem is that the fading between the two photos seems haphazard. I understand that the point of the photos is to show the contrast between the two time periods. As such, you want it to be clear that there are two photos being overlaid. However it just looks weird to have, for example, people be half-erased. The artist could have instead defined a blending edge that didn't cut across any people (or cars, etc.) so that each sub-region of the image looked fully-formed and thus more real. I think this would have made the effect more powerful.
Exactly!
Almost any one of those "then and now" photos where people hold up an old photo of a location while taking a photo of it now beat this collection in every aspect possible.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinflower/3611307186/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uwgbadmissions/3947916581/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uwgbadmissions/3768986885/in/set-72157621758292209/
Those have both an artistic AND journalistic feel to them.
The fact that you see the hand holding the photo actually connects you the viewer (cause it is seen from your perspective - as if it is your own hand), the person taking the photo (cause he/she is right there in the photo) and the location in both past and present.
The way those photos in the article are done now the final result just seems lazy.
Slap two photos of the same location one on top of the other, and then run around the edges with an eraser tool. Ta-DAH!
No skill, no art - just a gimmick that was old back in the '90s.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well, I'm in my mid-late twenties and all my grandparents are/were old enough to remember the war years but the most I've ever heard about it from any of them was my paternal grandfather mentioning how everything was rationed. Of course, he was only in his teens at the time, wasn't like he was a soldier or anything...
(Please note: I'm european so my perspective might be a bit different, I've been a student at a university where to this day there are visible signs of the fighting (bullet and shrapnel damage on the walls) that I would walk by practically every day and my history lessons in grade school were with a german woman who told us stories of how terrified she was when the apartment building she lived in got hit by allied bombs while she was hiding in the basement and how the civilian population in Germany experienced the war)
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