"Your Mirror To The 20th Century": 30 Pics Of How Much Or Little Life Has Changed Since

Bored Panda spoke to writer, visual artist and photographer Margaret Sartor, who is currently teaching at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. We asked her why people are so fascinated by historical pictures. “All historical photographs are a window into the past, but beyond the facts (or a nostalgia for the past), they may indicate little else,” Sartor explains. 

On the other hand, moments of the past are not the only thing old photos can reflect. They may trigger us to reevaluate what we know. “Some historical photographs have the power to subvert familiar narratives and carry with them the possibility of expanding or upending our understanding of our own history,” Margaret says.

Margaret personally is very interested in a unique way of developing photographs that was used in the 20th century – using glass plates. “These glass plates are now over a century old and have, themselves, lived a history,” she explains the fascination.

Margaret talks about what makes them so special: “The resulting cracks, scratches, and subtle tonal shifts in the negative surface at times seem to embody the very texture of life. They point directly to the ways in which experience is inflected by passing history.”

It’s easy to think that photographs developed with a hundred-year-old technology would be poor in quality. Margaret says it isn’t so. “Given these large negatives' capacity for detail, they are vibrant and sharp as anything we can do now with a digital camera, but they have also been enriched and made more beautiful by the effects of time’s passage,” she tells Bored Panda.

For those who want to be moved or inspired, Margaret recommends the photography of Hugh Mangum, a portraitist who worked in the American South at the turn of the 20th century.

“His eloquent portraits depicting people from a wide range of racial and economic backgrounds are a surprising and unparalleled document of a very turbulent time in our history,” Margaret tells us. She says that these antique images surprise her with their artistic freshness: “their sometimes disquieting fragility aligns with how it feels to live in the world today.”

Although Margaret Sartor teaches at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, she’s not snobbish when it comes to the art of photography. “Anyone could be a photographer, just like anyone can draw or write a sentence if they can hold a pencil; the camera is simply a machine, a tool, a medium,” she believes.

Sartor claims that like in any other medium, the mind is the most important thing. “A photographer, in any era, is someone who chooses to use the camera as a way to explore or discover something about the world or their place in it,” she explains. You can capture an authentic moment even with an iPhone – it’s the idea behind it, the feeling that it gives the viewer that matters.

“Photographs are not the truth, but they can lead us toward it,” Margaret gives a quick rundown of the meaning of pictures as a whole. “As human beings and citizens, we are constantly trying to see ourselves and our ever-changing, often conflicted world as clearly as we can—hoping it matters, hoping we matter, wondering what happens next."

"The magic of photography is that photographs move us in ways we can neither control nor can we fully explain and in that sense they remind us that ordinary life is suffused with mysteries.”