So much time has passed...and not much has changed.

April 17, 2008 11:40 PM

YOUNGME - NOWME. Amusing recreations of childhood photos.
posted by zardoz (23 comments total)

This one's eyes are giving me the creeps...

Also, why are some of the pairs of pictures the same?
posted by Rhaomi at 12:21 AM on April 18, 2008

Also, why are some of the pairs of pictures the same?

I assume because they're recreating the fact that they weren't very smart when they were children.
posted by davejay at 12:34 AM on April 18, 2008

it's really just a bug, though.
posted by davejay at 12:35 AM on April 18, 2008

i'm bewildered at the lack of attention to detail on most of these. if you're not going to try to recreate at least some of the details, why bother?
posted by Hat Maui at 1:30 AM on April 18, 2008

Yeah, I agree with Hat Maui. This is such a cool idea and is well done by some of these photos -- but not others (second one from the top -- this guy didn't even try!)
posted by Locative at 2:22 AM on April 18, 2008

The three brothers (I presume) in Superman t-shirts cracked me up, and was worth the price of admission alone. Also the now enormous guy sat on his mum's lap with a glum expression.
posted by Abiezer at 2:32 AM on April 18, 2008

These are fun! I really like the people who took the details seriously, like the one Abiezer mentioned above (it's on this page, scroll down halfway) of the mom and son.
posted by amyms at 3:02 AM on April 18, 2008

Some of those are hilarious. I'd link to my favorite, if there were an easier way.

ZeFrank is a god among men.
posted by Dave Faris at 4:20 AM on April 18, 2008

Seconding the big guy sitting on his mom's lap. The facial expression is priceless!
posted by vodkaboots at 4:57 AM on April 18, 2008

We sort of did this - we had a picture of my sister and me curled up in bed, sharing a pillow. We recreated it with my son and her daughter.
posted by Lucinda at 5:11 AM on April 18, 2008

These are a lot of fun -- I'm inspired to do one of my own. Except I'm lazy and have trouble following through, so I probably won't.
posted by brain_drain at 5:33 AM on April 18, 2008

shudder
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 5:53 AM on April 18, 2008

Some of them were more fun for the people recreating the picture than the people viewing it, but others, even not worried about details (tricycle to bike race, father kissing baby girl to boyfriend kissing young woman) are still awesome.
posted by garlic at 6:16 AM on April 18, 2008

I liked the dancing girl in her living room, who in the Now photo clearly used her childhood photo as inspiration for a performance! (You can see it projected behind her onstage!)
posted by typewriter at 6:41 AM on April 18, 2008

The dancing girl one is even better - it's a video of her dancing projected on stage and she dances along with herself. And yeah, the superman brothers were awesome. Some of the photos are very cool because when you have the same angle and facial expression you can see how similar peoples' faces are between their young and older selves. Anyway, this is totally awesome even if some of the photos are only approximate recreations.
posted by GuyZero at 8:06 AM on April 18, 2008

I can't get to the site to see the dancing girl, but if it's the one I think it is, she redid the whole piece!
posted by bink at 8:09 AM on April 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

This is so much fun to look at.
posted by spec80 at 8:18 AM on April 18, 2008

Haha, nice.
posted by cashman at 9:21 AM on April 18, 2008

These are great! The "lack of detail" didn't bother me, because it is so cool to see how many people have treasured pictures of themselves as kids, and how their faces still look the same.
posted by misha at 9:53 AM on April 18, 2008

Thanks everyone :)

This has been a really cool project - and as some of you have seen, there are permalinks now.
posted by slactoid at 2:38 PM on April 18, 2008

Ha, this is awesome. Sometimes when I'm negotiating with people and they're pissing me off, I imagine them as their childhood selves which causes me to be much more gentle and with fantastic results. Thanks for posting this.
posted by snsranch at 3:00 PM on April 18, 2008 [3 favorites]

there are permalinks now.

Thanks. I was wondering if I had just overlooked them when I posted earlier today. Thanks for confirming I'm not a total idiot... (at least where this is concerned.) Excellent project. Thanks for the laughs.
posted by Dave Faris at 4:27 PM on April 18, 2008

Thanks so much... the comments have been amazing - even on reddit of all places.
The idea wasn't mine, I'm the monkey pulling the strings behind the scenes, to that end:
for any development geeks out there, I just got rails fragment caching working (with memcache and cache_fu!), so requests should be much much faster now.
posted by slactoid at 6:49 PM on April 18, 2008