Back 1975, American photographer Nicholas Nixon once took a photo of his wife Bebe and her three sisters, and they came up with an idea to make it an annual tradition. Since then, the Brown sisters took a photo every year till 2010. To make the series more coherent, the four sisters – Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie – always posed in the same order.

As part of the 2004 History Channel ad campaign, titled ‘Know Where You Stand’, photographer Seth Taras merged together modern day locations with major historic events. Soldiers, rushing at the Normandy beach in 1944 go past colored modern family picking shells, and Hitler poses in front of the Eiffel Tower where two young students lay around reading newspapers – these are the contrasts that those places have seen in time.

As we grow old, we don’t even notice all the small changes that happen to us daily. In her portrait series called Identities, London-based photographer Ana Oliveira observes how people change as they grow older. Ana’s models would provide her with pictures of themselves from the past, and she tries to recreate the original pose, clothing and style. The final combination of the before and now shots are somewhat of a road map of the life that each of the models has traveled.

To “raise awareness of the social and economic challenges the city of Detroit,” the folks at Detroiturbex decided to tell the story about an abandoned Lewis Cass Technical High School with the help of superimposed then-and-now photos. First, they photographed every room the old Detroit school, which was abandoned after a 2007 fire. Then they put the pictures of the buzzing life from the past on top of them.

Many times pictures speak louder than stories: by creating a time-lapse portrait series of soldiers before, during and after the war, Lalage Snow reveals more about their psychological drama then their own words could. Titled “We are the not dead”, the portraits show an 8 month span in the lives of the British soldiers that were deployed in Afghanistan, and the changes in their eventually weary faces are striking.

What started off as a small blog with just 6 family pictures based on a principle of matching an old photo with the present day setting, has now turned into highly successful site of digital nostalgia with hundreds of submissions from all over the world. Here are some of our favorite and most heart touching dear photograph picks.

History is often seen as a subject of cramming – what we often don’t appreciate, is how intertwined it is with our present. Dutch historian Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse tries to demonstrate that very literally with her Ghosts of War photo series, where she blends the present day and the original World War II pictures of the same place into one. Jo spends hours looking for the locations and taking pictures that match the originals, and then photoshops them to combine the war ghosts into the current settings.

After reading “San Francisco is Burning”, photographer Shawn Clover decided to combine the photos taken right after the 1906 earthquake with the modern-day San Fransisco. He tried to find the exact spot the photographer stood, the equivalent focal length and the same high off the ground where the camera was. Unfortunately, he soon found that it was impossible to replicate many of the original photos because they were taken in places where new buildings stands today…

It’s not big news that celebrities and models get photoshopped all the time, however it was really hard to tell just how much Photoshopping had been done. Researchers in the Department of Science at Dartmouth College have finally developed a software tool that can rate photos based on how much digital altering has been done.

Do you remember Irina Werning and her cool project called “Back to The Future” we’ve posted earlier? Well, it appears that Irina hasn’t stopped there and released the part II of her series. A photographer born in Buenos Aires takes someone’s old photo and recreates the same old scene with the same person many years later. While it might not sound too complicated, she is unbelievably accurate – it seems that she just found some old and young look-alikes and shot two pictures on the same day.

Irina Werning, a photographer born in Buenos Aires, started an interesting project called “Back to The Future” where she takes someone’s old photo and recreates the same old scene with the same person many years later. While it might not sound too complicated, she is unbelievably accurate – it seems that she just found some old and young look-alikes and shot two pictures on the same day.

There is a popular saying in Russia that before you marry you should take your bride to the sauna first. You may think it has to be done for some dirty purposes, but actually wise men explain it differently…