Dear Photograph

The premise of Dear Photograph is simple: take a picture now which includes a picture of the same location taken at an earlier time. Dear Photograph was started earlier this year, and has received a lot of press since then – see, for example, this blog post from The New Yorker. The New Yorker piece also mentions the “Back to the Future” project by photographer Irina Werning, another example of photographs being used in a remarkable way to contrast the past to the present.

Camera Lucida was very interested in the relationship between photographs and memory, and the idea that the essential fact of each photograph is proof of the actual existence of people and things. I wonder what Barthes would have made of Dear Photograph?