I have spoken in the past about photography as a kind of time travel. Yes, you can look and at some strange level interact with people from the nineteenth century, and that is a wonderful experience. But perhaps more intimate is to look at an old picture of yourself, this because you associate with the picture. You might even remember the picture being taken. And the strangest aspect is that the person in the picture with the strange hairstyle, or in my case with hair itself, it is you, yet it is not quite you. Phew! What does it all mean?

In the literature and Gedankenexperiments about time travel, there is the paradox. How can you go back and interact with yourself, if you don’t remember having done it, and also don’t you risk changing events and therefore undoing (that is obliterating yourself). In the philosophy of science, the kind of late night conversations with wine especially, there are ways around this paradox – especially ways involving parallel universes and what are referred to as world lines in space and time. Doesn’t that some profound and cool.

Photographer Irina Werning has explored time travel of this kind with a twist. In her “Back to the Future” and “Back to the Future 2 2011” series. What she has done is taken a snapshot of an individual, typically 20 years old, and paired it with a reenactment of the scene. The results are both delightful and magical. I really love it. It is a kind of every man and every woman version of Nicholas Nixons now forty years of photographs of “The Brown Sisters.” Here there are just two images, one before one after. It is an exploration of both change and immutability. And some of the images subtly seem to ring to profounder issues, like coming of age (Carli 1990 & 2011 Buenos Aires) and major world events (Cristoph 1990 and 2011 at the Berlin Wall). I am amazed at the availability of some of the image props and details and how much likeness prevails. I think, this a really wonderful series and much to be applauded.