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A few years ago, a strip of old medium format black & white negatives came into my possession. It contains pictures taken by my grandfather in the area around his home in rural Germany in the 1920s. The exact date is unknown but one of the pictures is a self portrait, so we could at least do a rough estimate.

I was able to identify some of the locations on the pictures, so I set out out reproduce them. Matching the locations and perspectives exactly turned out to be quite difficult, and the old negatives were in a bad shape after being hidden behind a drawer in a cupboard for about 80 years, so they needed a lot of manual post-processing. I only got one picture finished and I haven’t found the time to work on the other ones in the four years since, but I’d like to take this chance to publish at least the first picture.

Here’s the original scene from the 1920s:

And this is the same place in 2003:

I’ve prepared larger versions on a separate page with a mouse-over effect that allows you to compare them easily.