Time Machine

We picked this little gem up from the charity shop today. If you haven't seen one before, it's called a VIEW MASTER and was very popular in the 60s and 70s as a thing to have at home or to pass around at parties as a conversation starter. Basically it's a slide-viewer that you look through to view special 3D images taken in all sorts of places around the world, and back when it was new it was really little more than a curio.

But now, this wonderful device gives you a view back through time that is really something unique. The slide disk on top of the pile at the bottom of the image is of Berlin, but not the Berlin we see now. This was Berlin just after the wall was built, and the 3D images give a really haunting look at a piece of history that ended in 1989 and completely disappeared a few years later.

The images are tiny, and the colours a bit over-saturated, but the power of the images pushes through all of that, and you find yourself face to face with history in a way you don't get in a book.