1920s

Travel back in time to Paris during the roaring '20s featuring flappers, bobbed hair, and cloche hats in this short 2-minute archival video colorized by Glamourdaze. The video was created using artificial intelligence to restore the footage and add color.

Rooftopping photographers have gotten a lot of attention and notoriety in recent days for climbing to extremely high points in cities and shooting photos while often teetering on the edge. It turns out photographers were already pulling similar stunts nearly a century ago.

The picture above (by an unknown photographer) shows a photographer taking a picture of New York City streets while standing high above on the corner of a skyscraper. It was taken sometime in the mid-1920s.

We've shared what we believe to be the first ever selfie in history, but we've never had occasion to share the photograph you see being taken in the image above. Taken in the 1920s on a rooftop in New York City, what you see being captured might very well be the first ever group selfie... although we're pretty sure they didn't call it that.

What's a photographer to do when they're in possession of a 130-year-old wooden camera and a 100-year-old lens, capable of capturing images using the wet plate collodion process?

Well, if you’re Jonathan Keys, you set out on a mission to document the modern world around you using tools that are all but ancient in the world of photography... and you get spectacular results for your effort.

Back in 2009, award-winning editorial art director and artist Mark Michaelson released his book Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots. In it he had compiled more than 10,000 mug shot portraits taken between the 1870s and 1970s. Portraits of the "punks, sneaks, mooks and miscreants" he referred to as the "Least Wanted."

For his portrait series Wanted, London-based photographer Nick Dolding decided to recreate some of the most striking of the mug shots found within Michaelson's book.

About a month ago, we shared some stunning footage that showed what London was like all the way back in 1926. The original filming was done by Claude Friese-Greene, whose father William invented the 'Biocolour' technique of capturing color film footage.

That particular video was a compilation of snippets that Friese-Greene had filmed in London when he returned form a 2-year journey. He called the final product The Open Road, and it was a 26-part series that took him all over Britain. Fortunately for us, much of it has now been digitized and uploaded bit-by-bit to YouTube by The BFI National Archive.

Belgian photographer Filip Bunkens recently did an engagement photo shoot with a couple named Mattias and Adinda, who proposed that it be 1920s-themed. Last Sunday morning they gathered at a local jazz bar for the session.

Earlier this year, a set of mugshots from the 1920s showing Australian criminals made the rounds on the Internet. When art director Michael Jason Enriquez came across this portraits, he was struck by the artsy-ness of the photos. He writes,

There’s a strange connection that draws us into vintage photographs. Seeing doppelgängers (look-a-likes) in old pictures is our brain’s way of linking us to the past. We see what isn’t there - someone recognizable, a family member, maybe a friend, and then there are the ones that bear an uncanny resemblance to modern day celebrities. We’re so used to seeing celebrity faces on our tv, on blogs, and we even know what their mugshots look like. The tacky looking mugshots we have today are in stark contrast to the mugshots taken in the 1920’s. Vintage mugshots have an eerie beauty to them that’s lost in current mugshot photography. What would celebrity mugshots, the ones we’ve become accustomed to seeing on TMZ, look like if instead they were taken in the 1920’s?

Enriquez decided to find out, and created Mugshot Doppleganger, a website to which he posts Photoshopped images of celebrity booking portraits fused with 1920s mugshots.