Rephotography
Encyclopedia
Rephotography is the act of repeat photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...

 of the same site, with a time lag between the two images; a "then and now" view of a particular area. Some are casual, usually taken from the same view point but without regard to season, lens
Photographic lens
A camera lens is an optical lens or assembly of lenses used in conjunction with a camera body and mechanism to make images of objects either on photographic film or on other media capable of storing an image chemically or electronically.While in principle a simple convex lens will suffice, in...

 coverage or framing. Some are very precise and involve a careful study of the original image. Long a technique for scientific study, especially of changing ecological systems, it became formalized as a form of photographic documentary in the middle 1970s. The founding work in this style was the Rephotographic Survey project, conceived in 1977 by the project's chief photographer, Mark Klett
Mark Klett
Mark Klett is an American photographer. Klett was born in Albany, NY. After getting a B.S. from St. Lawrence University in Geology in 1974 he worked as a photographer with the U.S. Geological Survey...

. This project engaged 120 sites of government survey photographs from the American West first recorded in the 1870s. The resulting book, Second View, The Rephotographic Survey Project, included precise rephotographs of the same locations 100 years later along with an essay by Klett on the methodology and problems encountered with rephotography. Klett revisited these sites a third time for his 2005 book Third View with a new team of photographers including Byron Wolfe, Michael Marshall and Toshi Ueshina. The acknowledged master of urban rephotography is generally agreed to be Camilo José Vergara
Camilo José Vergara
Camilo José Vergara is a Chilean-born, New York-based writer, photographer and documentarian. He was born in Santiago, Chile.Vergara has been compared to Jacob Riis for his photographic documentation of American slums and decaying urban environments...

, who has worked since the 1970s in most of the major urban centers of the United States. Unlike the Rephotographic Survey, which recorded dramatic changes over approximately a century, Vergara's pictures record often small, incremental changes: the abandonment and adaptive reuse of housing project sites, changes in use of buildings and sites as sociological and economic conditions change.

The accurate rephotographer usually determines several facts before taking a new image. An important starting point is the choice of the older image. To show continuity between the two images, rephotographers usually include in the frame a building or other object which is still there in the modern view. Some urban scenes change so much that the original buildings shown have been completely obscured by subsequent skyscrapers, or have been demolished. A "then and now" photograph could be taken but there would be nothing in common to link the two images.

The vantage point from which the original photographer took the view may have disappeared over the years, so the rephotographer has to choose an original view for which the vantage point is still accessible, or arrange to rent equipment to duplicate the original position of the camera
Camera
A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

.

Since modern camera
Camera
A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

s have lenses that differ considerably from older lenses, the rephotographer also has to take into account the area that the lens covers, and the depth of field
Depth of field
In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image...

 available. Older lenses were softer than their modern equivalents, and usually of a larger aperture
Aperture
In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. More specifically, the aperture of an optical system is the opening that determines the cone angle of a bundle of rays that come to a focus in the image plane. The aperture determines how collimated the admitted rays are,...

, reducing the "wide-angle"
Wide Angle
Wide Angle is the debut studio album by British breakbeat trance producers Hybrid, and was re-released in 2000 as a double-CD edition entitled Wider Angle...

 feel that modern lenses record.

Through scrutiny of the original image, the rephotographer determines the season and the time of day from observation of the vegetation and the shadows shown in the original view. The best way to do this is to set up a camera
Camera
A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

 at the original viewpoint, at approximately the right season and time, and wait with the original view in hand, until the shadows reach the same positions relative to surrounding objects. If done with extreme accuracy it should be possible to place one image over the other, and see the edges of buildings match exactly. A good example of this type of rephotography can be seen in the McCord Museum of Canadian History's virtual exhibition "Urban Life through Two Lenses." It shows the nineteenth century views of Montreal by William Notman
William Notman
William Notman was a Canadian photographer and businessman.Notman was born in Paisley, Scotland in 1826, the same year in which photography was born in France. William Notman moved to Montreal in 1856. An amateur photographer, he quickly established a flourishing professional photography studio on...

, rephotographed by Andrzej Maciejewski in 2002. Another is Douglas Levere's project, "New York Changing", has recently been published. Here Levere rephotographed 114 of Berenice Abbott's, "Changing New York" images.

Rephotography is often used by the scientific world to record the effects of erosion
Erosion
Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...

over time, or to measure the extent of sand banks in a river, or other phenomena which change slowly over time.

Rephotography has also been a useful visual method for researchers in sociology and communication to understand social change. Three main approaches are common - photographs of places, participants, or activities, functions, or processes – with scholars examining elements of continuity. This method is advantageous to studying social change due to the capacity of cameras to record scenes with greater completeness and speed, to document detailed complexities at a single time, and to capture images in an unobtrusive manner. Repeating photographs offer "subtle cues about the changing character of social life" (Reiger, 1996, p. 7). Upon analysis of elements of continuity within the images, researchers must be cautious to not make erroneous interpretations of change. Another closely related use of rephotography has been the political one made by Gustavo Germano in Argentina, who rephotographed family pictures of disappeared, thus making explicit both the missing people and the life that goes on.

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