This photo is a good example of something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Photos get passed around on the internet without attribution (or, as William Gibson calls it, attribution decay, where the origins and credit for content get lost in the sharing) and certain aesthetics (Old West, pre-war, mod 60’s) get copied so faithfully that it becomes hard to tell what is and isn’t genuinely period photography. I’m 99% sure this is from RRL or something similar, but it’s interesting to see people replicating the past so successfully that it passes for authentic artifacts from the period it’s replicating. I suppose for the most part we’ve always lived in a future built on a mythical past but for some reason the digital equivalent of this is fascinating to me.
cultwestern.com 