Earlier this year we brought you a report on a photograph taken with a man in it that seemed to be from another time period entirely as he took photographs of a bridge reopening on an island town. And now it appears another photo has resurfaced, giving many people cause to question, “Why does this man look so ahead of his time?”
The photograph depicts several men busily unloading bananas from a ship. Almost everyone in the photo, including dock workers, is wearing a bowler hat contemporary of the turn of the century when the photograph was no doubt taken. And yet one man stands in the center with a strange far off look on his face sporting a mohawk and one suspender. His left sleeve looks artificially torn, and he is wearing pants with only one suspender. While everyone else in the scene is busying themselves away loading the bananas into a cart, this solitary figure seems to have suddenly appeared there with a bewildered look on his face. He looks like a man out of time. No one else in the photograph seems to be acknowledging him, and he is clearly standing out from the rest of the crowd.
Many people around the Internet are suggesting this photograph seems to be of a time traveler of some sort, although unlike the Bridge Hipster, this one appears to have traversed time entirely by accident. At least that’s what many are suggesting. A cursory examination of the photo’s background reveals the words “Hemmenway’s Sail Loft” which was a business that existed near Wall Street in New York around 1905. Those examining the photo have noted that the man in the photograph looks like he has been transported straight out of a 1980’s rave into the past and is now looking bewildered hoping to figure out exactly what has happened.
What would have happened to someone transported back in time in 1905? Since the man would have no doubt been in an advanced state of agitation, he may have been taken to police and questioned. If he had been unlucky and not clever enough to avoid the authorities, a time traveler would have no doubt been forced into a mental institution. Conditions in the institution would have been harsh, and he would have either made a complete “recovery” as an amnesiac with a fictional account of his past involving time travel, or he would have simply been institutionalized indefinitely. Even if it is simply a major coincidence, the photograph raises several questions about time travel and what it might be like to suddenly find yourself transplanted into an alien world. Would you resist the incident and attempt to find your way back? Or would you simply accept it and live out your life as normally as possible in this different time hoping nothing you do could affect your timeline and cause an impossible paradox?
While the most mundane of the two possibilities is no doubt that the man was simply wearing a style that would not be realized for several decades, the journey the imagination takes when we take into consideration the time travel possibility is no doubt far more entertaining.