There's no reason why the past cannot be viewed, those photons merely have to be brought ahead into the future faster than they normally would. The light would already be en-route so that 'reading' it wouldn't affect anything.

I can see two scenarios, wave or particle. Lightwaves travel over vast distances and would have to be reflected back to view them. We cannot seen them otherwise because we cannot catch up to something travelling at the speed of light. This problem would have resolution problems the same as viewing distant celestial objects. I doubt it would work if we wanted to view light from prehistoric times reflected off some distant nebula and picked up by a telescope. I doubt we could resolve an image.

The other idea is if light is encoded in a solid substance. Perhaps as a residual spin of molecules that has somehow survived through the millennia. We perform some kind of electromagnetic magic and the 'information' is released as photons to form some image. We could see anything that was in full view of the particle sample at the time the information was encoded.

Just like digitally recorded media. Except it uses ordinary dirt, or fossilized material, or ancient artifacts. It takes quite a bit of imagination.