Snap! How photographs from the past became an internet sensation

Taylor Jones was sifting through a box of old family photos whenhe found a picture of his younger brother sitting in a chair at thekitchen table. The 21-year-old Canadian looked up and noticed thatthe same chair was in front of him. Lifting the picture to fit withthe background behind it, he stumbled across an idea which haslanded him a book deal and turned his photography blog into a globalinternet phenomenon.

"The past month has been crazy. I can barely keep up," he toldThe Independent by phone from Ontario. "I had an idea and it justwent mad." That idea was as simple as it was infectious: take apicture of an old photo held up in front of the place it wasoriginally taken and post it online. The result is a seeminglymagical doorway to the past, filled with nostalgia, that combinesthe old method of printing photographs with the viral might ofsocial networking.

In a month, Mr Jones's website DearPhotograph.com has gone from astart-up blog to the latest cyber "meme" with more than 3.5 millionhits and an army of dedicated fans. "People can relate so readily toit," he said. "After the five photos I originally posted I've beencrowd-sourcing other people's photos. I get about 30 photos a dayand so far the site has had around 3.5m hits."

Submissions have come in from across North America, Britain,Brazil and Australia. Every day, Mr Jones wakes up to a new batch ofphotos from people dusting off their family albums and giving them anew lease of life. Part of the website's appeal is the way eachphoto contains a caption underneath it providing a brief - and oftentantalisingly short - description of what the photograph means tothe person who took it.

Mr Jones said the shot with the most hits so far was posted aweek ago and shows an old man looking at a bench. The old photoshows the same bench and the same man with his laughing wife yearsearlier. The caption reads: "Dear photograph, thank you foreverything we had."

"That one has been really popular," he says, "It's pretty decent,really intense. It's really cool to see people's stories behind thephotos."