Some fascinating photographs came across my computer screen the other night — images taken from the recent history of D.C., but ones that showed how far the city has come, or, in some cases, hasn’t. The images are the work of Michael Horsley, who had a rare eye for the future when he set off through the streets of the District of Columbia in the mid to late 1980s with his camera, hoping to capture a scene which is, despite being only a little over twenty years old, feels totally foreign today. Horsley, who said that he intends to make the images available for historical purposes, describes the work:

From 1985 to 1988 I wandered the streets of Washington DC photographing the unseen and vanishing moments of the city. These images lay dormant in the archives until I realized that they needed to be brought to life before the persons and spaces are totally lost to entropy and time.

These images are my first serious photographic work, and it was consciously documentary with an aim to presenting the subject matter 20 years in the future. I purposely photographed subjects that were nostalgic, historic, or appeared to be so.

These images depict the hidden parts of Washington DC rarely if ever traversed by tourists. Here are the places and some of the people trapped in their own world while the rich and powerful swirl around in a seemingly separate world a mile away.

Photographers have an uncanny sense of capturing “the last of its kind”. As you can see, many of the things I photographed were for the future, which is now/today although at the time I vauguely knew it.

DCist is excited to present a few of Horsley’s fantastic relics of those days above — we encourage you to go to his Flickr page and immerse yourself completely in the entire 263-image Hidden Washington set.