50 Times People Attempted To Recreate Their Photos From The Past And The Result Was Hilariously Wholesome (New Pics)

In recent years, recreating decades-old photos has become a popular trend on social media, with millions of people sharing their side-by-side comparisons. Remember the “I’m Just A Kid” challenge on TikTok that helped many of us not go insane when everyone was locked inside their homes? Good times. But why are we so eager to relive our past?

For many, it's a way to reconnect with happy memories from the bygone days. While there are no statistics to back this, we have a hunch that recreating vintage photos does make people feel happy and nostalgic, bringing back fond memories of family and friends. As we wrote earlier this week in a post about the positive effects of nostalgia: "It generates positive feelings, improves self-regard, and even enhances our bonds with others."

But it's not just about nostalgia. Recreating photos from the past can also be a fun way to show off creativity and humor. Or a way to reflect on the past retrospectively. "I think my own interest in the past has a lot to do with having grown up in a rural place. My hometown has hardly changed in the last 100 years, so I was constantly surrounded by traces of the past," Conor Nickerson, a Montreal-based photographer, who famously Photoshopped himself into his childhood photos from 1997-2005, told Bored Panda via email.

"Especially in a time when we're so divisive, it has been a really important reminder for myself that we all just start off as a child trying to make sense of the world, as cliché as it is to say."

Nickerson, who since then started restoring and colorizing vintage photos ("To be able to see the world that your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents knew, the way that they saw it, is really fascinating to me"), and making a brilliant video series called "A Conversation With Myself", where every once in a decade he'll chat to himself at different stages of his life, believes part of the charm in recreating photos lies in, well, nostalgia. 

"There is also a lot of uncertainty in the world right now, and we're constantly inundated with information about how chaotic everything is. For many, childhood represents a much simpler time," he said. "I think people want to return to that simplicity now more than ever, and these kinds of photo or video challenges and projects provide a way to reconnect with that feeling."

Of course, let's not forget the social media aspect. With platforms like Instagram and TikTok, people can easily share their recreations with others and receive instant feedback, which in turn can award them with dopamine. Or kindness and a sense of encouragement. "Reading the comments and messages that I've gotten in the years since sharing the project has been wonderful," Nickerson told of his "Childhood" series, which was so popular at the time that people wanted him to do that with their childhood photos.

However pleased Conor was with this, he declined, saying that "it's not really feasible to do as commissioned work, unfortunately." (He published a step-by-step tutorial on his YouTube channel showing viewers how to do it themselves, instead.)