Cass Tech: Now and Then:

Some awfully clever folks over at detroiturbex.com ("exploring and understanding the city of Detroit") have sought to document the city's social and economic collapse by creating this clever yet very affecting project where vintage photographs of a thriving Cass Tech College circa 1990s have been laid over modern digital photograph of the school in its current dilapidated state. Forty Three of these very poignant yet quite creepy images can be seen here:

http://detroiturbex.com/content/schools/cass/thenandnow/index.html

What I find especially amazing about this is just how perfectly they have managed to sync up the old pictures with the new ones. I've tried this myself and it is extremely hard. Methinks there may be technological jiggery-pokery involved here. Not that that is really a problem. I'd just love to know how they did it so well.

I had an interesting mini conversation with a friend about how images of Detroit's urban degradation (and the exploration of such places) is being used as "Ruin Porn" and directly ignoring the more real and far less romantic problem of the collapse of a social infrastructure. I think that while most romanticised images of ruins and ruined buildings (hey, photo-geeks have been getting off on images of ruined buildings since the dawn of Photography, look at Eugene Atget or the London Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings) ignore the social and economic realities of how they came to become ruined in the first place, I'm sure that the photographers of highlighting the issues here and not of simply exploiting the scenery. I think that these images pull off a double-whammy of being especially poignant, nostalgiac and romantic while at the same time adressing the very problems at hand through their arresting visual trickery.

Said friend also directed me towards a more light-hearted yet equally arresting and successful example of this current trend of laying-new-photos-over-old (or composite-photo-projects as they are more generally and more snappily titled) in the shape of these lovely images of New York Buildings and scenes seen in movie stills of the past:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2013/01/hunting-movie-scenes-past-real-life-new-york/4294/

Mad props to Erin and Anne for the heads up.