Before the Ghost of Christmas past have passed us by, and this past Christmas has become a faded memory, I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a very clever photoshopping piece by Peter Macdiarmid of Getty Images/ Hudson/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive. Mr. Macdiarmid has carefully merged antique images of Christmas with contemporary ones taken at the same location.  The piece raises the very significant point that in place there is both timelessness and change.  And of course, the whole concept turns itself around, when you realize that today is (or will someday) be in the past.

Some years ago I went to Rome, and we purchased this little souvenir book that had photographs of the ancient sights.  Overlaying each of these was a plastic sheet which was a painting that took the site back two thousand years to ancient Roman times. I was struck both by the ambiguity of the ephemeral and the permanent nature of things – of human experience and vision.  We tend to think of change as transition, but as these images the ones in my guidebook and the ones created by Peter Macdiarmid, illustrate change is in a sense a diffusive or random process, a brick is removed, a brick remains. On a dark winter’s day people still bustle in Trafalgar Square under the watchful eye of London policemen.