Jo Yardley, avatar name for the owner and lead creator of the well-known recreation of 1920s Berlin in Second Life, has a fascinating first life project she's even more famous for: Merging archive photos from World War II with their modern day locations in Europe. (As above.) In real life she's Dutch historian Jo Teeuwisse, and her work is currently being featured on the Daily Mail in the UK, but you can see all the images from her "Ghosts of History" project on her Flickr here. You've probably seen some of them on various websites over the past few years, as they've enjoyed spikes of viral interest.
"It started as a tool to help me with research, but it didn't go big 'til after I'd started on [SL] Berlin," Jo tells me. "Over the years I've done research for movies, TV, museums, authors, etc. But this I started after finding some negatives at a local flea market, and I just had to find out more about them."
By overlapping scenes of peaceful, modern day Europe with glimpses of Europe when it was wracked by war, these pictures have had a profound impact on many viewers:
"Veterans wrote me to thank me," she says, "And teachers said it was one of the few tools they had that made an impact on their pupils. So then I just started making them because people loved them."
"It's interesting," I tell her, "because while virtual Berlin is virtual reality, these photos are a kind of augmented reality."
"Yes," answers Jo Yardley/Teeuwisse, "in a way."
Thanks to James T. Reichert for the tip!
Thank you Wagner for sharing these photos by Jo Yardley/Teeuwisse. She had a very good idea and the result is great.
Posted by: Pepa Cometa | Sunday, August 27, 2017 at 07:06 AM