jonathanfranzen

Pynchon is on my dream list of people to be able to eventually add. For now, I like to imagine he is in the background of every photo with an NYC crowd over the last 60 years.

Creator here - yeah, proving photo provenance has gotten more challenging. When I started this in 2019, if you found a photo of Alice Cooper with Colonel Sanders on an old blog, you could safely apply Occam’s razor: “Would anyone bother meticulously photoshopping this?” Since relaunching this year, I have to scrutinize sources much more closely, and adding richer metadata/context has become essential. Maybe in the future, new photos only work if this lives inside something like World App.

You basically have to take a trip through Rogan's studio if you're trying to connect, say, a WCW midcarder and Roger Penrose, which is the exact curiosity this site exists to fulfill.

Creator here — the site runs a shortest-path search over the set of photos I’ve manually verified. Thanks for pointing this out, I just added Carson-Leno and Leno-Cooper, so now their interview guests are all down to a couple hops. Talk show hosts are major connectors! Letterman is a real skeleton key to the 20th century, he interviewed Edward Bernays who has a pic with Eleanor Roosevelt, and it all pops off from there.

Creator here – everyone on the site right now is connected, and you can imagine how everyone living today could be added with photos that already exist! The really interesting cases are the historic outliers – like Harriet Tubman, Edgar Allan Poe – who were photographed with others but still can’t be linked into the main graph from anything I’ve found so far. I’m working on a write-up about these “most wanted” isolates.

My hobby is collecting rare and obscure photos of historical and notable people together then adding them to my website where you can see how any two people can be connected through appearances captured in photos.

With this website I aim to make the close proximity of all living and recently alive people a fact you can visually process.

Basically a “Oracle Of Bacon”/”Six Degrees Of Separation” visualizer.

Some interesting examples:

– James Joyce to Muhammad Ali in 3 photos

– Napoleon III to Ja Rule in 5 photos

– Grigori Rasputin to Lizzo in 6 photos

– Nikola Tesla to Elon Musk in 6 photos

– Charles Dickens to Frank Sinatra in 6 photos

I plan to add a user registration and submission system so you could add yourself with photos of anyone you have already on the network.

Any feedback is much appreciated!