Februar 2019

Jonathan Jones blickt mit Leidenschaft zurück und findet so Fotoschätze der letzten hundert Jahre. Er zelebriert diese Zeitreisen seit einigen Jahren auf seiner Website Retronaut.com , und kuratierte für Europeana.eu und nun Mashable.com . Über 40.000 Bilder findet sich in kleinen Zeitkapseln zu verschiedensten Themen wie Blicke auf die Londoner Elfenbeinhändler um 1920, Irland in den 1960ern oder Napoleanische Veteranen von 1858.

Um es mit Jonathans eigenen Worten zu beschreiben:

For me, the past seemed as exotic and enticing as another country, but one which I could never visit. Even in my earliest years, I felt a strange, almost uncanny, sense of loss, not only for my own past but for pasts I had never known. This feeling, and fascination, remained with me as I grew older, and I began to notice that certain old photographs had an interesting effect on me.  
Most old photographs ‚fit‘ the internal map of the past that we carry around in our minds – a map made up of our memories and images we have seen.   But some photographs do not. Some pictures seem anachronistic, as though they cannot belong to the time from which they originate. As an example of this, many of us imagine the past in black and white – so when we see a colour photograph from the, 1940s – like the one on the left – 0r the 1920s, or even earlier – it doesn’t fit on our map. 
When I saw such pictures, my mind did a kind of „double-take“ – as though it wasn’t quite sure what time it was seeing, or even what time it was in. The pictures had the power to collapse my mental map of time, changing ‚the past‘ into ‚another now‘.  And this ‚double-take‘, a sort of temporal dislocation – this felt, to me, like time-travel. 

Jonathan Jones

Zur Website: retronaut.com