2018

Another country. The Retronaut website collates fascinating photos from the past.

James Collard meets its founder, Wolfgang Wild.

Its the people who really pull you into the photos on the Retronaut site. A smart woman about time, looking a bit crossed at being snapped; a handsome face that somehow stands out in a group portrait; or a likeness captured as someone goes about their day in Soho… Or rather went about their day. The smart young woman, for example, is in a Retronaut “capsule” on street-style in 1905-1908. The handsome face might be that of an Austrian-Hungarian POW in World War One; while the passer-by was photographed by Bob Hyde, a photographer who shot London in the 1960s. For Retronaut, as the name suggests is a website all about the past - but designed to make us look afresh at the past. Or, as its founder Wolfgang Wild, would put it, not so much the past:

“Because the people in these pictures didn’t think of themselves as living in the past. These are just other nows.”

There are lots of other nows on the Retronaut site. The peasants of Pre-Revolutionary Russia, shot in vivid colour by photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii. Or closer to home, Covent Garden in the 1970s, when it was still a market, not a retail or tourist destination. There it is, complete with porters lugging crates of fruit and veg, its handsome buildings looking a bit dowdy and rough around the edges, the way London often did back then, before the capital acquired all that Nineties and Noughties gleam and polish.

Or photographs of British Sailors from World War I - only these British sailors aren’t the ruddy-faced old tars we might expect, like the sailor pictured on an old packet of Player’s, because they’re all black. Or my favourite capsule, which is a series showing World War II gunners at play - only weirdly, inexplicably, but deliciously, these soldiers are all in drag. Quite convincing drag, actually. But surely this isn’t our perception of British soldiery at wartime - our Finest Hour spent cross-dressing, indeed.

These hit singles are not the only kind of image he puts up on the site. But they’re how the website built its cult following - and secured partnerships with entities like Mashable, and TopFoto. For while Retronaut is about the past, it couldn’t be more current in its use of social media - and the way Wild finds much of his content in the vast archives that have been digitised by museums, libraries, and cultural institutions. “Museums have great material”, he explains,“but they’re not always good at identifying what might be cool, or at getting it out there”. There have also been Retronaut books - the book remains his preferred way of displaying photography, and he has curated exhibitions in the UK and New York.

Wild has a particular passion for taking photographs from the past and showcasing them in colour, especially as colourisation of black-and-white photos has reached a level where you can produce an almost immaculate version of the original. ”But even black-and-white photographs are interpretations”, he points out. “They’re not an empirical recording; its about the camera, and that time. And rather than wanting to recreate exactly what something looked like, what you’re aiming for is something believable, and that sense of disruption.” A case in point: the image Wild had colourised by Gavin Wieszala for Goodwood Magazine. Photographed at a Goodwood race meeting in the 1930s, she wouldn’t look out of place at Revival today. Its all just a question of those other nows.

But these kind of surprises are stock-in-trade for Retronaut. It’s a bit like a joke, Wild explains, with a set-up line, and the punchline that subverts it. “We have a version of the past in our heads, and when we’re confronted with something that doesn’t fit that, we’re thrown. And at that moment of disruption, the barrier between the past and the now seems almost to disappear. Time collapses.”

Wild, who founded Retronaut site in 2010, grew up fascinated by the idea of time travel. “As a child I’d been obsessed with the idea of going back in time, starting with Bagpuss, when you see the Edwardian children and then suddenly it all comes to life in colour.” “The past is another country”, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote, and for Wild that’s precisely what makes it “exotic and exciting”. And its Retronaut’s mission to communicate that excitement.

Retronaut began with a loan from Wild’s mother, and a set of photographs taken in London in the 1940s, in colour. “I had drifted through my life until my late thirties”, Wild confesses. “I tried out all kinds of different things. I worked in publishing, I was a teacher, I did some training consultancy, I sang in a band… but none of it ever stuck. I was always searching, but never found my niche.” His wife, meanwhile, is an Oxford professor whose specialist subject is “the translation of the psalms into Medieval English by female mystic writers. So she has this thing, but I never seemed to have my thing.”

But something his wife had said after Wild had lost yet another job helped him find his thing and bring Retronaut about. As he recalls, his wife said “Look, you’re clearly unemployable, so just go ahead and just do something you want to do.” Wild realised that over the years he had sought out images that for him somehow had that startling, time-collapsing quality. And so, with that loan from his mother and this idea in his head, Wild launched his Retronaut site in 2010 and started putting up images.

“For the first few weeks, no-one was looking at anything, except me and my mum. And then suddenly, one image went viral - London in the 1940s in colour - and we got 30,000 hits”. Wild uses the very analogue analogy of “hit singles” to describe the moments when an image goes viral on social media. “Before long I was routinely finding material that went viral. I could look at any archive and see very quickly what would work - all based on the fact that people have an internal map of reality, of the past, but our map is very partial when we look at the past”. So the Retronaut rule is: “The more a picture doesn’t fit on our map, the more it will go viral”.