'Retronauting': why we can't stop sharing old photographs

Vintage pictures shared online by accounts such as Retronaut, HistoryInPix and IndiaHistoryPic capture moments gone for ever, but as vividly as the here-and-now. It's a heady mix of nostalgia and history

View a gallery of stunning vintage pictures
The power of photography: time, mortality and memory

It was the sign advertising Brylcreem that got me. It can be seen in one of Chalmers Butterfield's colour photographs of Piccadilly Circus in 1949. Why did it move me? Brylcreem's range of hair styling products for men is still very much with us. Personally, though, it always means the red plastic pot of the stuff my dad kept ever-ready in the bathroom of our home in the 1970s. It spoke then, and does now, of his youth in austerity Britain, skiffle-board Britain, Teddy Boy Britain.

What is nostalgia? For me it's triggered by the sense that my parents might be young people in Butterfield's deep colour vistas of the West End of London. For enthusiasts who post historic photographs on Twitter, it's more broadly scattered. These pictures reveal the wealth of photographic documents, memories and arcana that these sites have dragged into the 21st-century limelight, from an 1890s portrait of Cornelia Sorabji, India's first female advocate and the first woman to study law at Oxford University, to the building of the Hoover dam in Roosevelt's America.

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