Time Traveling Hipster — Modern hipster man on a park bench wearing futuristic sunglasses, acid-wash jeans and pink boat shoes

Time Traveling Hipster

2010viral photographclassic

Published October 3, 2026

The Time Traveling Hipster is a 1940 photograph from a British Columbia bridge reopening whose young male subject looked so wildly out of era that online posters joked he was a time traveler. After an obscure Canadian museum put the image online in 2010, forum threads and tech blogs turned it into one of the defining 'time traveler caught on camera' memes of the early 2010s.

conspiracy memes viral photo memes historical photo memes early 2010s memes mystery memes

Overview

The Time Traveling Hipster centers on a black-and-white photograph taken at the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in British Columbia, where a crowd of fedora-clad attendees from 1940 includes one young man who looks wildly out of era4. He wears wraparound sunglasses, a stamped graphic t-shirt layered under a chunky knit sweater, and holds a compact camera, giving him the look of a 2000s hipster rather than a wartime Canadian bystander1. Gizmodo summed up the reaction by calling him a 'bro' out of era and writing that his whole essence screams 'another era entirely'1.

Debunkers pointed out that his wraparound sunglasses match a style seen in the 1944 film Double Indemnity2, and that the 'M' on his shirt plausibly belongs to the Montreal Maroons, an NHL team active from 1924 to 19389. His camera is consistent with Kodak folding models sold at the time. None of that stopped the picture from becoming shorthand for 'time traveler caught on camera' jokes, blog analyses, and explainer videos across the 2010s.

Origin & Background

Platform
Bralorne Pioneer Museum archive (source) / Fark, Forgetomori, BoingBoing (viral spread)
Date
2010

The photograph belongs to the Bralorne Pioneer Museum in British Columbia, Canada, with a handwritten note on the back reading 'Reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood in Nov. 1940. 1941 (?)'2. Bralorne is a former gold mining town northeast of Vancouver whose community archives were collected into an online exhibit called Bralorne-Pioneer: Their Past Lives Here4. The exhibit went live through Canada's Virtual Museum in February 2010, which is how the mystery hipster first entered public view5. The identities of the photographer and the people standing in the frame are still unknown2.

How It Spread

Users on Fark and the AboveTopSecret conspiracy forum both posted the picture on March 22, 20106, though neither thread took off right away. The image went wide after the blog Forgetomori published an April 15 analysis defending the photo's authenticity while leaning into the time traveler framing2. BoingBoing picked it up the next day under the headline 'Time traveler caught in 1940 photo?'3, and Gizmodo ran its own write-up on April 17 calling the subject 'time travel bro'1.

On April 20, 2010, Forgetomori posted a follow-up with a second photo of the same bridge reopening sourced from the John Wihksne collection, taken from a different angle but still showing the same young man7. On May 5, Brooklyn culture blog FreeWilliamsburg named him the 'Time-Traveling Hipster', locking in the nickname that stuck8. A YouTube explainer compiling the frames and the time traveler case helped push the image to a wider audience10. In December 2010, an NTV crew from Russia visited the museum in person and reported that the original print was real5.

Timeline

1940-11

The original photograph is taken at the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in British Columbia after a flood.

2004

The image is shown to museum visitors as part of the Bralorne Pioneer Museum exhibit 'Bralorne-Pioneer: Their Past Lives Here'.

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