The subreddit r/OldPhotosInRealLife is pretty much the closest thing we have to a time machine. Its 596k members are constantly comparing past and present through rephotography — the act of taking a photo of a place that has already been photographed before. The end result is like a portal, fusing together two different periods.
After we at Bored Panda published our first story on this online community, we’ve kept an eye on it and quickly realized that its earlier posts weren’t a fluke. From overgrown Machu Picchu in 1915 compared to the site in 2020 to visitors in The Metropolitan Museum Of Art in 1910 and 2019, r/OldPhotosInRealLife consistently features interesting angles, presenting things in a different perspective to the one we’re used to.