Photographer Tracks Down People He Snapped in His Hometown Almost 40 Years Ago

Photographer Tracks Down People He Snapped in His Hometown Almost 40 Years Ago(designyoutrust.com)

89 points by nokicky 9 years ago | 18 comments

wtvanhest 9 years ago |

Kind of off topic, but I found a book (around 60) original photos from US WWII solders getting ready to go to the Pacific while stationed at pendleton and on Hawaii. Some include identifying information like names. It occurred to me that their family members may want some images.

Is there anyone aware of a place to upload them so that their family can find them and downloadview them?

mc32 9 years ago | |

Flickr has on occasion been used for those purposes. Typically someone will set-up a group with a specific purpose. Search for some groups, ask them some questions. The users/members tend to be very helpful, in most cases.

wtvanhest 9 years ago | | |

I wouldn't mind scanning it, but I just don't have the time to do the work to search people out. I'll probably get them scanned and upload to Flickr, then do a post on reddit wwii

mark_integerdsv 9 years ago |

Interesting, a cursory scan through suggests that in groups of friends, the men stay together whilst the women tend to have moved on/away from the group.

I wonder is this has to do with the communication styles of men and women where men focus on shared experience whilst women focus on outwardly shared communication (do things together as opposed to talk about things together.)

lucozade 9 years ago | |

It's probably a little simpler than that. My guess is that, in the 2 pictures, the boys were friends and the girls were girlfriends of the boys.

It's also likely that one of the friends saw the photographer's advert and between them only had contact details for the other men. I doubt it's possible to extrapolate much as there were plenty of women in the other photos.

StefanKarpinski 9 years ago | |

I noticed that as well, but only in groups that are mainly men. I immediately wondered if it was the effect of (unconscious, presumably) bias on the photographer's part – i.e. that in a photo of a group of male friends, the women are decorative or less essential somehow. Another explanation is that the guys all knew each other well while they only knew the girls in the photos in passing, making them harder to track down. But the photographer managed to track down so many other people, that hardly seems to explain it.

lucozade 9 years ago | | |

There's probably a form of survivor ship bias going on here.

From the text he took a lot of photos. If he advertised in local newspapers, school/football club sites etc, he wouldn't need to find everyone. He'd just need find someone who could get a quorum of the people from a particular photo.

As such, it's probably more likely that he'd only find friends as he wouldn't need to find the group, just an individual. If, for example, he had found one of the girls but not a boy, chances are he wouldn't have taken the photo.

mtw 9 years ago |

Interesting project! There are a few who seem to stay young (black hair or shiny blond hair) and others who took a toll

Also sad to see the homeless people who were already homeless 40 years ago.

wh0rth 9 years ago |

A friend of mine got married and realized after about 2 years that he and his wife had known each other when they were kids. They found a picture of each other playing on a playground from 25 years earlier. They weren't friends or anything, but had certainly bumped into each other before.

0xmohit 9 years ago |

This is simply incredible.

Apparently it has been captured in a book "REUNIONS" [0].

[0] http://www.chrisporsz.com/the-books.html

afoot 9 years ago |

Such an interesting area for him to have done it in. I think the results in say London or another big city would be quite different as it's not an areas that has really thrived and people are much more likely to stay local.

caipre 9 years ago |

This reminds me of the 7 Up Series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series), where the same people are interviewed every 7 years, starting about age 7. The director of that series is unfortunately quite heavyhanded in the questions he asks, but the project itself is quite interesting. Next episode will show in 2019, I believe.

mgkimsal 9 years ago |

There's a bit more about the people in the pics here in this dailymail article

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3900776/Photographer...

jaoued 9 years ago |

Amazing. These are all pictures taken in the UK. Pity there is no picture taken at a Fish&Chips with the then popular newspaper wrapper and then seeing the equivalent 40 years later.

nsomaru 9 years ago | |

Its still done like that in South Africa. A fish chain here prints fake newspaper onto their packaging which wraps the fish.

Colonial habits die hard ;)

Luc 9 years ago |

Seems there's a bit of an overweight problem in that town, no?

nokicky 9 years ago | |

I don't think it's just that town, it's the world!

Cthulhu_ 9 years ago | | |

A sign that there's plenty, at least. The UK does have more of a weight issue than other parts of the world though. I'd say it's mostly cultural, with beer and relatively cheap yet bountiful food being the main culprits. Takeaway food / culture is another factor. I've always found the UK to be somewhere in between the US and western Europe in a lot of cultural ways (wrt food, TV adverts, etc)