A Cool Twist on Travel Photography

I don’t update my Instagram often, but I just love travel photos–both taking them and looking at them. Opening up my photo app reveals I have 58,593 photos and 438 videos spanning the last decade of travel. I also have collections of print travel photos from my family — some dating back to the Civil War era. But I don’t have this —

Meet Christian Carollo. He found a box of his grandfather’s travel photos and thought it might interesting to see if he could replicate them.

As it turns out, he could. And Carollo hasn’t stopped since. He travels the U.S. taking the same travel photos his grandparents took in the 1970s and ’80s, everywhere from California’s national parks to villages on the East Coast. He cross-references his grandfather’s images with his grandmother’s impeccably detailed travel journals to find the right spots.

Check out this page for a few samples. Now that is cool.

After reading this, I am tempted to do the same thing — my uncle traveled through Western Europe and Scandinavia in the 1960s, taking many photos, and my brother and I will be retracing the route with him next year.

Sounds like a plan.

Looking at those photos, though, what amazed me most is how little many scenes actually changed. But perhaps that is nothing to be amazed about. I used to spend every summer in San Francisco with my family. We always stayed in the Pacific Heights area and this became our beloved and familiar stomping grounds. I was recently in San Francisco and while there are always new stores here or there, the neighborhood has changed very little. My Mexican restaurant has not changed at all–

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