Chevy Commercial Uses Photos to Tug at Heartstrings, ‘Dear Photograph’-style

During the World Series last month, Chevrolet aired a new commercial that might have felt familiar to many of you. Featuring old photographs overlaid on their modern day locations, the concept is identical to the images found on the website Dear Photograph, which we featured back in June.

Dear Photograph‘s owner, Taylor Jones, says that his website helped popularize the technique, and is miffed that he wasn’t credited by Chevy:

When you look at it, there appears to be a lot of creative similarity, so I was hoping they would a least acknowledge that they were inspired by my site. I didn’t invent the technique of taking a picture of a picture — but I did popularize it by creating a unique site that brings together the physical technique with deeply emotional reflections that are expressed as captions. My site receives submissions from around the world and has been seen by more than 10 million visitors [#]

Regardless of whether the idea was inspired by Dear Photograph or not, it’s cool when the creative photographic techniques we feature here become popular and show up in mainstream media.