User friendly Navigation on Single page WebApp with several overlays

I am developing an angularjs App. There are lots of data entities ( eg photographers) displayed in a list. By clicking on one you get Detail data displayed in an overlay. There are links to other detail-overlays in there to. So you can navigate directly from a photographer Detail overlay to an photographer-institution Detail overlay and further on.

At some point the user will ask himself something like "how do I get back to the photographer Detail I opened first?". For now, it is possible to navigate back using the browsers back button. But that seems not obvious enuogh to me.

First I thought of something like a breadcrumb, which we used decades ago. As this seems a little oldfashioned and they could get very long too, I wondered if there are other ways solving this problem? Any patterns or working examples?