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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.
It's a great way to remember past events by envisioning them through today's eye. Very cool.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
This is probably the most interesting use of photoshoping I've seen yet. By seeing the conditions of the streets and buildings merged straight into modern times, you really get a sense of how war-torn the world was at the time.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The point was to look at place years after they had been destroyed and to contrast the iece of history with now. NOT to make it seem like it's happening right now.
Seriously, get with it.
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Gets really quite eerie when the pictures are displayed in a software capable of switching to greyscale. Not "better" of course, the contrast was surely also the point...but interesting, more blended.
Though it does make the photos more distant, I guess - doesn't help with how, while being a small kid, I thought for some time that the world had to be so sad place in the past, without colors ;) (I apparently missed the existence of color paintings/etc.; and, in retrospect, wasn't very wrong; in some twisted way...)
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Spoken like someone who has never created a work of art. There is more value there than the technical expertise require to create it, just like there is more value to a painting than the technical expertise of the paint strokes.
Content is everything.
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He's done quite a few: http://sergey-larenkov.livejournal.com/
I wouldn't think any American under maybe 75 could relate to WWII
Those over the age of thirty have a much better chance of relating to the technology base. As someone else pointed out, it was a lot easier to talk with someone who was actually in those wars. Likewise, many more civilians were also private pilots. Many of the instructors were war pilots - or at least someone you stand a chance of bumping into at the airport.
These days, the number of WWII vets who are still alive are quickly dwindling. Which is why there are active projects to record their stories. Unfortunately, it doesn't change the fact, that in an era of endless plentiful, most American's can not begin to appreciate the sacrifices even the civilians made to further the war effort.
My statement was not made to be snide and no, I didn't arbitrarily adjust the age; though low 30-ish is likely more accurate now. That's the age most studies indicates a rapid falloff takes place in awareness of those wars and the associated technology base.
Hei!
sergeylarenkov000.jpg (3rd photo) is Hofburg in Vienna, Austria ->http://goo.gl/M7r8
sergeylarenkov11.jpg (11th photo) is Paulanergasse in Vienna ->http://goo.gl/GDJ2 (right next to the TU Wien)
one of the others seems to me like Budapest, Hungary - but i'm not sure.
Greetings from Vienna!
ßeta
I'm only 27, and my maternal grandfather was a WW2 vet, but he was really reticent about discussing his experiences. The only stories he would ever tell me were pretty tame anecdotes about a few humorous events. I think the gruesome things that he saw in terms of blown up, mangled corpses were not only painful for him to recall but I think he thought it was in poor taste to talk about those things. I don't begrudge him his perspective.
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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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It should be worth noting that the "photoshopping" means using Adobe Photoshop. Retouching is the word for a general process of photo modification regardless of the software used. In short, every time someone says "photoshopped", they are advertising Adobe Photoshop for no compensation. :)
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
Despite the lack of technical skill, the artist achieved the goal of having me feel that I was standing in another's shoes.
I am guessing here, but I am quite certain that you were actually moved by the original art and authenticity of the old photos he picked for their "power".
Kinda like how an old song sung by an "American Idol" star doesn't get better - it was good to begin with. At best, it will be "OK". At worst... well...
And it works the same way for "professionals" too.
And no amount of hardware can make an artist out of a hack. Particularly not a tablet in this case.
To fix those, one would need to use some actual elbow grease PLUS something the "artist" clearly lacks - the eye of a photographer.
Cause those photos he used are not photographs. Those are snapshots.
Not a single impressive point in any of them. They are completely expressionless and "dead".
Why? Cause he was taking photos of dead things - buildings. Whoever was taking those old photos was taking photos of living people.
Living people doing "important things". Meaningful things. Things worth being preserved for posterity.
In the new photos people are there simply by accident. Utterly meaningless and completely unmotivated.
Those photos don't contrast - they clash.
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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Almost half of these photos are in St. Petersburg. The building with the golden dome next to the anti-aircraft gun is Saint Isaac's Cathedral. The tank driving under an arch with a column in the background is near the Hermitage and Palace Square. The next photo has the Kazan Cathedral, and the photo after that looks like St. Pete, but I'm not certain. The photo with soldiers marching with the river on the right has the Peter and Paul Fortress in the background. The following photo with the kids in the street has the Russian Admiralty building in the background. A couple of others (soldiers marching with river on left and the next one with the Jazz Philharmonic sign) also look a lot like St. Pete.