Sometimes, a postcard showing the plainest of scenes can be made magical by some small element in it — e.g. an odd effect of light, a chance expression on a face. This uncredited collotype of a street corner in Lindsay, Ontario is just such a card. While the scene is of a residential street dominated by a line of trees that obscures any view of houses or gardens, the odd poses of the children draw one’s attention. They appear to be almost mesmerized by something unseen, off-camera to the left.
Unfortunately, we don’t have an image of what it was that so transfixed these children … unless, that is, we imagine them looking through a “worm-hole” in the space-time continuum, across about 106 years, at the scene in that exact spot on Google Earth (as of October 2014):
Click the link to see what the children saw … across time
There is more going on in the world — and in postcards — than we realize!
[Andrew Cunningham]