Rephotography can refer to the photographing of the same object or location at different times.

The term “rephotography” or “rephotographic” comes from The Rephotographic Survey Project made in 1977 by Mark Klett, Ellen Manchester, and JoAnn Verburg. They photographed or “rephotographed” the same locations as previous photographs of locations of the American West from the nineteenth century. A conceptual part of the project was to attempt to accurately recreated the original photographs by setting the camera in the same location and matching the time of year and time of day of the original photograph.¹

Later in 1998 Klett revisited sites in the west to rephotograph them again for a Third View project. He also made panoramic photographs that combined old photographs amid a series of present day photographs as a way of showing that the past, present and future are all linked, inseparable, yet different. This technique revealed that a photo of “Karnak Ridge” by Timothy H. O’Sullivan was taken at an angle to make the rocks and formation look taller and more imposing similar to VFX tricks in movies that show heroes “scaling” buildings while walking on level ground.²

Rephotography has become ubiquitous with the increase of photography powered by small portable electronic devices such as cell phones and machine learning computer vision algorithms. Many photo applications will automatically scan a library of images for similar subjects and framing to create “then and now” parings showing a variety of subject matter from different times, similar to the original concept of rephotography.

Further Reading

• History Pin  crowdsources matching historical and contemporary photos to locations using street view and GPS.
• Time Travel Rephotography  uses a unique unified image processing method to enhance and colorize historical photographs.

References