40 Interesting Photos From The Past That Show How Europeans Lived 100 Years Ago

Bored Panda got in touch with researcher and art critic Arie Amaya-Akkermans to discuss photography and how it affects the ways people imagine the past. We wanted to hear his opinion on how we can limit modern biases when looking at images from history.

“It is really not possible to limit the effect of modern biases implicit in interpretation, mostly because the images themselves were culturally constructed in their own setting, and affected by the production of time: photographs produce time. When human elements and tools and debris are removed from photographs of archaeological sites, either while being staged or in post-production, it means the images are being manipulated, but isn't also the case in family photographs or in the kind of pristine cityscapes that appear in postcards or in influencer selfies? Biases are implicit to reading images from any period, and fundamentally, to looking; what is it that we're looking at and why? Today it is even more complex considering that there are more images of our world produced by surveillance systems, software and AI than taken by humans, which brings us to the need to re-imagine what we really mean by images.”

“What is the real temporality of the image? Is it really in the past? One of the insights of the French thinker Baudrillard is that images do not necessarily refer to the real world anymore, but in fact to other images. This idea has robbed us of the poetry of the history of photography, from the seduction of this much desired photographic object and its cultural meaning, but perhaps for the right reasons. Perhaps images have lost their power to shock us, hence how inured we are to images of war today.”

“Photography is also an ideological mechanism, what we're looking at are systems of knowledge, cultural conventions, regimes of representation, but also images that can be used to define political narratives: Whose refugees? whose prisoners? whose destroyed heritage? and most importantly, whose pain? And this usage of photography as propaganda is not even new, it started with the Spanish Civil War, which was very close to the invention of the daguerreotype. In the art market as well as in the world of connoisseurship the myth exists that images are neutral, but this is hardly the case,” he shared.

“You can see it today in the overrepresentation of ethnicity and the "other", which is in theory intending to cumulatively address an imbalance between Western self-representation and that of others, but in the end it simply ends up selling the illusion that the issue has been addressed and that the imbalance no longer exists and everyone claps, but this is just an aesthetic gesture. Do photographs alter how people view the past and can this perception be manipulated? Obviously yes, but it's also important to forget how recent photography is, it's even later than modernity, therefore it has only captured a tiny slice of our earthly life. I think so much is yet to change within photography in the next decades, our memory is changing, our image-world, and therefore photography will also have to adapt.”

“We're always keeping pictures of all kinds, on our phones, pictures of babies and cats, but also overseas travels and ads in the metro, wifi passwords and book covers, perhaps with the illusion that we will return to them sooner or later, but obviously we never do. Producing and storing these images is not only a human effort, but a technological capability, one with a profound effect on the environment, as is the use of all mass technology. But why? Why do we need to live constantly with these memory boxes? This casual everyday photography has transformed the nature of the photographic archive, weakening it in a way, because images seem unstable and unserious and we struggle to recognize them as art, even though we objectively know through museums that it is some kind of art.”

“So the image is in a moment of paradox, and I think it's no longer possible to go back, in spite of the popular cult of terms such as vintage or classic. Images are different from other capitalist products in that they can be consumed without being bought, and they can be hacked, altered, interpreted, rejected, without being acquired. So there's a certain democratic instinct in the act of taking pictures, but beyond that, the photographic act is no longer romantic or mysterious (although cinema has remained so for example). It is almost as if it was a physiological act... To see through another eye.”

Old photographs have a special power: they freeze a moment in time and offer us a direct glimpse into a world we never experienced. A black‑and‑white portrait of a sternly posed family or a sun‑bleached snapshot of children playing on a dusty street can transport us decades back, igniting our curiosity about who these people were and what their lives felt like.

Those yellowed edges and subtle creases become proof that this world once existed exactly as we see it, capturing light, shadow, and expression all preserved on film. Yet while old photos show us faces, fashions, and settings, they can’t tell us everything.

That smiling woman in her best Sunday dress might have been exhausted, anxious, or unhappy, but the photograph only preserves her calm composure. We see the gleam of her polished shoes but not the struggles she faced to afford them. We hear the echo of her laughter in our imagination, but we can’t know the tone or warmth of her voice.

Similarly, a photograph of a bustling market street reveals architecture, clothing styles, and the arrangement of goods on stalls, but it says nothing of the smells, sounds, or social dynamics at play. A passerby in the background might have been a relative or a stranger; the vendor might have been selling more than just produce, perhaps news, gossip, or political pamphlets. In each image, there’s an entire world beyond the frame that remains just out of reach.

Photographs also reflect the photographer’s choices, and biases. The decision of what to include in the frame, how to pose subjects, and when to click the shutter shapes the story we receive. Wealthier families commissioned studio portraits, selecting their finest attire and ideal backdrops.

Working‑class families, on the other hand, might appear mostly in candid shots, if at all. As a result, our visual records of the past can be uneven, privileging certain lives and experiences over others. Despite these limitations, old photos can still reveal unexpected truths when viewed alongside other sources.

A faded image of a family garden gains depth when paired with a diary entry about the hot summer of 1924. A picture of soldiers marching in formation resonates more profoundly when read together with letters sent home from the front. Combining photographs with oral histories, documents, and artifacts allows us to reconstruct missing details, the laughter, the conversations, the storms that rolled in just after the shutter clicked.

There’s also value in what photographs can’t tell us outright. The gaps, the unseen moments before and after the picture was taken, invite us to imagine, question, and explore. A lone figure standing on a platform makes us wonder where they were headed. A child clutching a doll suggests stories of play, comfort, or loss that we can only speculate about.

These unknowns fuel historians’ detective work and spark our own personal reflections on memory and time. In the end, old photographs are both windows and mirrors. They give us a window into past worlds, into people, places, and moments that once were, and a mirror reflecting our own desire to connect, understand, and remember.

While they can’t tell us every detail, their power lies in the questions they raise and the lives they hint at. In their silvered frames, we find the beauty of history’s fragments and the enduring invitation to seek out the stories that lie beneath.