Remember your favorite childhood photo of yourself, the one where you’re wearing your Magic School Bus T-shirt and trying to push your brother out of the way? Instead of just uploading shots like those to Facebook, Helsinki-based photographer Wilma Hurskainen has elevated her nostalgia with an insightful artistic project that we spotted at My Modern Met, using her old family albums to create a dialogue between the past and the present moment.
Hurskaine, who asked her three sisters to help recreate 30 family photos taken by her father, wanted each image to look as similar to the original as possible, so the backgrounds, facial expressions, and even their outfits are mostly the same, resulting in a beautiful visual portrayal of the passage of time. “There is something sad, almost tragic, about looking at old photographs compared to new ones and seeing how people and things have changed or grown up,” she writes. “By repeating a distant moment something weird is revealed about us as objects of the photograph in the first pictures: the way we play our artificial roles for the photograph.” Check out a selection of shots from the series after the jump and then head to Hurskainen’s website for more.
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen
Photo credit: Wilma Hurskainen