The Present as a Real Experience of the Past :: Edwardian Fashion In Colour: 1901-1911

We are all used to seeing elegant ladies in old photographs, but almost never in colour. This selection was photographed by various uncredited …

Edwardian Fashion In Colour: 1901-1911

— One notion I am playing around with, as to reality and Realism, concerns memory, media, and experience.

Never before the last few or so years has humanity has a direct experiential resource of the humanity of the past — our ancestors — that brings the past to a near equivalence with the present in view.

We have only had ideas, touch, hearing, perhaps taste, but never the present quality of seeing.

The seeing quality for the past has always had layers that remove the direct experiential sense from the present and the real presence of the human being. The two most significant, I postulate, are resolution and color. These two aspects of seeing have allowed our idea of the past to feel like the past, removed from us, more than the sight of fashion.

To have these colored photos I feel really makes me feel like they are my living neighbors, that I could easily experience them by walking out my door today.

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