Clever 'Now & Then' Series Shows Us the Future from the Past

Saratoga Springs, NY-based French teacher and photographer Samantha Decker has put a little spin on the Then and Now photo series concept that has become quite a recent trend. Rather than holding up old photographs against a modern day scene to compare a snippet of the past to the present, she swapped things around.

In her series, entitled Now & Then: Seeing the Future from the Past, Decker gathered public domain photographs that matched images she already had in her collection. She then held up her own prints in front of the older locations to produce a combination of aged, old-fashioned images briefly interrupted by vivid, contemporary scenery.

Decker creates interesting juxtapositions of things that have completely matured, like a fully functional building that was once just scaffolding, as well as places like the Eiffel Tower, which have hardly changed across time. Decker explains, "It's interesting to look at a scene as if you were seeing the future from that moment. My hand is meant to be in the scene from the past, therefore I tinted or colored it for each photo to match the scene."