We are so attached to certain images of some celebrities that seeing their childhood pictures leaves us surprised to find out they were once young, too. And guess what – most of them didn’t look like the most popular kids at school!

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.

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…