Chris Wild, Retronaut

John Mitchinson > Chris Wild

“Most of us imagine the past in black and white. The earliest colour pictures were taken in the 1870s so when we see those early colour pictures they look like now because they’re in colour. But it’s a different version now. So I started to collect these pictures because they gave me a kind of time travelling buzz.”

Chris Wild is the founder of Retronaut, an online repository of historical photographs. As noted by Fast Company in an article about Retronaut, the pictures on the site are chosen in a way that makes the viewer feel as though they are looking at an alternate present, rather than the past. Wild was a speaker at the TED Global conference in July 2010 and in November 2013, Retronaut was named by The Times as one of "The 50 people to follow on Twitter". Below is one of his noteworthy statements.

“We often think we need money or to overcome some other obstacle before we can do what we want to do, we think we need X before we can do Y. But actually, we can start right away. But with Retronaut, which has become very popular, I got just as much satisfaction on day one as I do now. That’s not changed. The making of it is the reward. Even if I think back to when I first showed these early photographs to my friend in the pub before I’d started making the blog this was true. Because I was curating, I was saying look at this picture, and that’s exactly what I’m doing still just on a bigger scale. “