Repeat Photography in Landscape Research

Introduction

A repeat photograph, or ‘rephotograph’ is a photograph specifically made to duplicate selected aspects of another, pre-existing photograph. The new image typically repeats the spatial location of the original, showing the viewer the same scene once again and inviting comparison. But other features of an existing photograph, the lighting, or the events depicted, may also be the subject of attempted duplication. The verb ‘attempt’ is appropriate in this effort, for a photograph made at one time can never be exactly replicated in another. And it is the differences between photographs that make them both compelling and informative when seen together. The result is a photographic diptych that spans an intervening period of time. The photographs act like bookends to the time in between, and the combination raises questions about what is not seen as well as what is seen in either photo. The ability of rephotographs to illustrate change as well as question assumptions about time insures their unique contribution to the medium of photography.

Rephotographs rely on a visual language that is almost universal. The ability to point out and compare differences between photographs spans a very wide range of viewer interests and levels of experience. However, the ability to interpret these differences is not universal; because when two photographs, an original and a rephotograph, are paired together the combination may illustrate change and the passage of time, but neither image can explain the events that led to that change.

Rephotographs have been used by researchers across many fields as tools, documents, and objects; how rephotographs are made varies among disciplines, just as what researchers expect from them ranges from documentation of data to poetic expression. Rephotographs can support both empirical and theoretical work; they may also become the subjects of research. From the natural sciences to the fine arts, rephotographs can help examine change and document the passage of time, most commonly in landscapes where the original subject of a photograph can be located and the space revisited. [Page 115]For example, rephotographs have been used in such wide-reaching projects as studying changes in plant growth and population in the Arizona desert, revisiting the now famous photographs of a major city, exploring the route of a historic intercontinental highway, repeating a collection of vernacular snapshots as a departure point for conceptual art project, and rephotographing the collection of an automobile club as the pathway to a changing urban environment (Hastings and Turner, 1965; Vale and Vale, 1983; Rosier, 2004; Levere, 2005; Kinder and Roth, 2005). These studies span the natural and social sciences, the fine arts, urban planning and land management, to name only a few of the disciplines involved.

Intervening time spans between photographs may be short term, as in the record of plant growth over a few days, or long term, as in monitoring the creeping movement of a glacier (Fagre and McKeon, forthcoming). Common to many disciplines, there has been a need to visualize change, and the overall connection has been to gain a unique perspective on time related to place that is independent of discipline and challenges the observation of any single moment.

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