Accidental Time Travelers

I subscribe to a lot of photo blogs, but Shorpy is one of the best. Not only because his or her depth of knowledge and depth of archives is profound, but because he or she always posts a high-res version of each of the images. Go ahead and click on the picture of the Amsterdam Theatre above to see what I mean.

Now, I'm not a big photography buff, but I care about the high-res images because it gives me the chance to look for time travelers. I don't mean that in the H.G. Wells, DeLorean driving kind of way, but in a more literal sense. People that, often without their own knowledge, are saved forever in photographs and film.

Take the picture of the New Amsterdam theater. If you look in the window of the store on the left, you'll see a man in a dapper coat and hat standing in the window display, looking out at the street. There's no way to find out who he is, but he had a life, and walked the street in the photograph. Maybe he had a family, maybe he would become a veteran of the Great War, maybe he would die in the hours following this photograph.

Whenever Shorpy makes a post, I look it over, looking for hangers-on that wormed their way out of another century and in to ours. This particular image has a few extras, in addition to our mysterious man in the window (who, I am willing to admit, might be a display dummy). If you look on the sidewalk in front of the theatre, you can see several blurry dark stains. At first, I thought they were just smudges on the sidewalk, but when I looked again I realized they were always in pairs. And sometimes had feet. These are time travelers that didn't quite make it, people that were moving too quickly to be caught by the camera.

Ps.

I am 100% certain that I have heard the term "accidental time travelers" before, and that it may have even be referencing the very same thing I wrote about here. Can anyone remember where it's from? I have a sneaking suspicion it's This American Life.