Time Sausages

Maybe you remember Al Stewart’s song Time Passages (which some call “Time Sausages”). I’ve always been intrigued by the passage of time and how things slowly and imperceptibly change along the way, changes you don’t even notice until you bookend the old with the new.

A very popular exercise of this nature (which you’ve surely seen in newspapers and books) is the “before-and-after” comparison of a landscape or city scene (or even a celebrity’s face, but that’s a different type of radical change and sometimes they do end up looking like sausages).

Back in the early 1980s I photographed just this sort of feature for my local Butler, NJ newspaper, Suburban Trends. Here is an example of my “Days That Used To Be” feature:

Funny thing is, I shot this so long ago I can now “go back and visit” in the Google Street View car (even though I am in LA now) and grab an updated contemporary photo:

In 1996-7 I was living in Nashville TN and continued this concept, at that time calling it “Retro Metro” (I made that phrase up, but I’ve seen it used elsewhere since. Which goes to show that everything you’ve ever though of and anything you want to sell on eBay is already being done…). After gathering some historical photos from local archives, I went out and reshot the scenes. Rather than presenting them in a static top-and-bottom layout, I made use of my new Apple PowerMac 7300 computer with 32 megs of RAM (!) along with Photoshop and blended the past with the present in interesting ways:

This image is my favorite “lucky accident”. While shooting the Union Station hotel, I captured a random car driving by and it happened to be in the exact same place on the street that the horse wagon was several decades before!

In 1999, Desktop Publishers magazine ran a couple of these Nashville photos in an article about my technique.

Scott Kelby’s Photoshop User magazine also ran a couple examples of these blends:

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