How to tell whether two old photos show the same street
I got this wrong in public two weeks ago, so I am writing down the check that caught me.
A local history society had put up two photographs with nothing written on the back. House fronts, pale stone, a slope, a telegraph pole. I said they were one street seen from two directions. I said it fast, because the buildings agreed with me.
They were not the same street. Here is what settled it, and it is all stuff you can do at a kitchen table with a magnifier.
- Compare the things nobody bothered to paint.
Fronts get render, windows get replaced, shop signs get taken down. What tends not to change is the ugly functional stuff: poles, stays, gates, the height of a wall, the shape of a fence post. In my two photos the pole looked similar until I counted arms. Two crossarms on one, two on the other, but one had a diagonal stay and the other did not. Different poles. Poles are cheap to replace and they get replaced, but they almost never get modified.
- Ask what a fence is doing.
One photo had a low dark lath fence running along the left. The other had a tall, light-painted lath fence with shaped post tops on the right. Neither fence appears in the other picture at all. A street with a fence on one side in both directions is possible. A street where the fence changes height, colour and craftsmanship between two shots of the same stretch is much less so.
- Look for one building that is in both, and be strict.
This is the test people skip because they want the answer. Take any single distinctive building in photo A, then look for it in photo B. Not “a house like that”. That house. Four chimneys in the bend, dormer at the gable, the odd roof pitch. In mine, the big four-chimney house does not appear in the second picture, and the dormer house does not appear in the first. Two streets can share a style. They cannot both be missing each other's landmark.
- Check the shadows agree about the hour and the direction.
If the two shots really are one street from two ends, the sun is in one place. Long tree shadows lying across the road in one photo and no such shadows in the other means either a different hour, a different day, or a different street. It does not prove anything on its own, but when it disagrees with the buildings, believe the sun.
- If you still only have “it looks like”, it is not an identification.
The honest end of most of these photos is a labelled gap: this is one of three streets with this terrace, from this side, and nobody wrote the year. That is a real result. A guessed village dressed up as a finding is worse than nothing, because it travels. Somebody reads it in five years and builds on it.
What made the mistake so quick to make is that similarity is loud and evidence is quiet. Four fronts agreeing with you feels like proof. A pole stay that is in one frame and not the other is one detail, and it beats all four.
I find the place in photographs for people who have the picture and not the caption. Free first look, then fifteen dollars, forty-eight hours, and you pay only if there is a location with coordinates at the end of it. When it cannot be done, I say so and it costs nothing.
Melanie — [email protected]