Beyond #TBT: How I Recreated the Same Photos in Europe 17 Years Apart
The writer is sprawling out in both these photos in front of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, only 17 years apart. Finding new people for the latest one wasn’t easy. (All photos: Mike Morrison/Swerve)
By Mike Morrison
For as long as I can remember, I’ve liked taking photos. I’ve never owned a fancy camera, just the best point-and-shoot I could afford. I love everything about taking photos, even if I’ve never ventured out of automatic mode. I like to document everything. I like to take 20 photos of the same thing and then pick just one or two to keep. I like to take photos of sunsets, even though I know they happen every 24 hours. I’m the guy who offers to take photos of tourists who are travelling alone. Their mother will want that photo. I know she will.
I honestly don’t know why you’d want to go anywhere without taking a photo of the experience. It’s the only thing that perfectly captures a moment in time. Even a historian’s tale begins to bend and weave as it’s told over and over. But, a photo, while it might fade and discolour, perfectly captures 1/100th of a second of somebody’s life.
A few Christmases back, my dad shipped out three big Rubbermaid containers of my memories. It was his passive-aggressive way of ensuring that I wasn’t going to be moving home to New Brunswick. The blue containers held mostly photos, but there were also negatives, yearbooks, movie tickets, even a pair of fake teeth I’d worn for a play in high school. The timing of the gift was perfect; I was spending that holiday alone in Calgary and I couldn’t be happier to spend Christmas Eve and much of Christmas Day going through memories of my life back in Fredericton.
I sorted the photos, scanned some to share on Facebook, and relived countless memories that I’d forgotten. It was probably the first time I realized that my brain is physically incapable of remembering everything. That meant as I got older I would remember less and less of my life. It was a defining moment.
Another soon followed. On Boxing Day, just a few days after I received my dad’s gift, I got the news that my friend had died in an accident.
The writer at Prague Castle …1997, then 2014.
Beyond the overwhelming grief, the thing I remember most about the days after the accident are, well, everything. It’s the only time in my life that I remember every single moment. I remember waking up to find 27 missed calls and dozens of texts on my phone. I remember every word I said from the minute I heard the news, until the day I delivered his eulogy. I remember what everyone said, what I wore, what I wish I’d said and what I wish I hadn’t.
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Those seven days are the longest I’ve gone without taking a single photo. There was no point. Even then I knew I wouldn’t forget anything, even if sometimes I wish I could. And, of course, I had photos to remind me of my friend. When I got news of his death, one of the first things I did was scroll through my phone to see the last photos I had of him. There were two. The first was taken at his annual Christmas party, after a particularly rousing game of beer pong. In the second, he is playing darts at The Ship and Anchor. I still look at those photos all the time.
During the week leading up to his funeral, I helped build the slideshow that would commemorate my friend. I took his laptop because, like me, he loved taking photos. (He introduced me to Instagram.) Of all the things we went through that week—calling funeral homes, picking up families at the airport, picking out a coffin—building a slideshow to encapsulate an entire life was the most difficult. I never want to do it again, but I’m grateful that the photos existed.
The writer (at right) in Budapest, then and now.
I regularly go through my old photos (those Rubbermaid containers were the only things I took with me when I was evacuated during last year’s floods). It’s when I’m at my most relaxed. A lot of the shots come from my time in a group called Characters Incorporated, about 30 young performers who sang and danced while wearing colorful tracksuits and waving giant Canadian flags. It was basically Young Canadians with East Coast accents and no lip-synching. I was in the group for three years, and in one of the Rubbermaid containers I found the journal and a stack of photos from a trip we took to Europe when I was 13.
Beyond enjoying the photos for memory’s sake, I never thought they would serve much of a purpose. But then my career as a blogger led to an invitation to join Insight Vacations on a trip to Europe last April, one that would stop at many of the places I’d visited in 1997.
Budapest Square in 1997…
Naturally, I searched for my photos from that earlier trip. When I found them, I knew that I wanted to recreate them. I grabbed a handful of photos and my original journal, packed my bags, and went to Europe. As soon as I landed in Prague, I showed the photos to our tour guide, Neira. She chuckled at the idea of the project, and also because I’d brought photos of the wrong cities. Along with the photos of Prague, Vienna and Budapest, which were on the itinerary, I had brought photos of Rome and Berlin, thinking they were of these other cities.
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It was sometimes emotionally overwhelming to realize that I had been to some of these places before, but had no recollection of them. I would have bet my life savings ($432.56) that I had never been to the Prague Castle. I would have lost my nest egg while standing in front of a church on the castle grounds, clutching the photo that proved I had been there years ago.
And Budapest Square in 2014.
I asked Chris Mitchell, a writer also on the trip, to take the photo. It’s a lot to ask someone whom you’ve just met to lay on the ground in front of a church to help take a photo, but he was a trooper and helped me check off the first photo on my list.
Luckily, after showing the first recreated photo to some of those on the tour, my project attracted some adherents. Along with Chris, Alicia from Vancouver and Annemarie and Carol, both from New York City, would meet me every morning and ask, “OK, what photos do we need to get today?” As the week went on, and they became more invested in the project, their questions grew more aggressive: Why hadn’t I brought a money pouch to wear around my neck? Why hadn’t I brought similar clothes to the ones in the photos? Sit like this, not like that. Move over. Move over. Keep moving. Stop. Too far.
Some photos were pretty easy. In Budapest, Carol had no problem asking a group of tourists to move out of the way in order to get a shot in Heroes’ Square. Later that day, for a photo at the Fisherman’s Bastion behind Matthias Church, Annemarie made sure that our hands and postures were exactly the same as in the earlier photo (Chris and Carol sat in for Skylar and Brittany, close friends from the first trip).
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In between photos, I kept comparing the ones we’d already recreated to the originals. The feeling of nostalgia is relatively new to me. When I was a teenager, I was discovering things for the first time. My 20s were full of exploring and never looking back. My 30s, at least in the two years I’ve been living them, are a mix of optimism that I’ve finally figured out who I am, and fear that it took too long. I am conscious, perhaps for the first time, of how quickly time is moving. This project just brought that home. When I took the original photos, Jean Chrétien was Prime Minister, Princess Diana was alive (albeit only for another six weeks), and Titanic was the year’s biggest movie. That was a long time ago, more than half my life. It was humbling, scary, sad, funny and disturbing. It’s rare for me to feel all of those things at once. I sort of liked it.
The most challenging of the recreations was the group photo in front of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. I had planned to ask my fellow travelers to pose with me, but their excitement to see the palace meant they dispersed quickly throughout the 1,441 rooms. I would have to depend on a group of complete strangers. I don’t speak German. I can carry on a simple conversation in Spanish or French but my classes never covered the phrase, “Hi, can you and your friends help me recreate a photo I took 17 years ago because, well, the Internet.”
I eventually amassed a group of people, and Carol and Annemarie tried to get them to pose. After a few seconds, my subjects disbanded in a flurry of confusion. I would have left, too. It was weird.
The first attempt at recreation in front of the palace had to be alone, but he won over the crowd after.
I settled for a photo of me just lying there by myself. I probably looked quite sad to the people passing by, trying to ignore me but unable to look away. It would have to do, but I was definitely disappointed. As we made our way back to the bus, I saw some people from our group huddled together. If I was going to get a group photo in front of the palace this would be my last chance. Our tour guide was already rushing for the bus, but I ran over and begged and pleaded with the group to walk back to the palace with me. It was hot, a bit of a walk, and when I get excited, I get shrill. They hesitated, but once one person said yes, they all said yes. It was happening. We made our way back to the grounds and, after a few minutes of shuffling and assigning positions, we took the photo and ran back to the bus. Mission accomplished.
If you were to walk up to me today and ask me my biggest fear, I would say it’s that things are going too fast. This photo recreation project proved there’s not much that I can do about that. While my memories of my first trip to Europe don’t feel fresh, they don’t feel that long ago either.
Now, as I compare the new photos to the older ones, I think the group photo is my favorite. The one taken 17 years ago has all of my friends at the time. I’ve lost contact with many of them, even in a Facebook-obsessed world, but it’s good to be reminded of those friends. The newer photo shows a group of my new friends.
At this moment, I feel like I’ll never forget them or the trip. How could I? It was so memorable. I know that’s not the case, however. I’ll forget their names. I’ll forget where those photos were taken. I might even forget that I twice visited that church within the walls of the Prague Castle. But the photos will at least provide me with a comforting, if non-specific, memory of some good times. And that’s reason enough to keep smiling.
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