Arguably, the practice of place rephotography is as old as the popularization of the photographic medium itself. Conceptually, it could be said to embrace the infinity of amateur shots of sites—from Grand Canyon to Eiffel Tower to Taj Mahal—still taken with no more claim to originality than the photographer’s personal fingerprint. If still in the realm of documented place, considerably more intentionality has colored a range of more recent projects involving revisited photographic sites. Here we might include Arthur Smith’s Pittsburgh project, Jason Powell’s flickr “Looking into the Past,” and the various iterations of the Rephotographic Survey initiated by Mark Klett drawing on the iconographic imagery of the American West.
Concurrently, several photographers have looked to place rephotography as but a stepping stone towards creative expression (Florian Maier-Aachen’s engagement with Carleton Watkins’ California) or perceptual critique (Trevor Paglen’s evocations of Timothy O’Sullivan). One need only consider Doug Rickard’s rephotographing of Google Street View images to recognize that exponentially-expanding potential visual source materials for place rephotography are reaching new heights both in quantity and in conceptual complexity.
The proposed paper looks at current trends in place rephotography with particular attention to the less evenly-developed theoretical infrastructure supporting it. Jason Kalin’s reading of rephotography as a deliberate tool of memory construction and activation responds well to documentary impulses; Helen Westgeest has made strides in contextualizing rephotography within the critical history of the medium itself. This paper—deriving out of current work on the visual rhetoric of place and the role of appropriation therein—builds on these to situate place rephotography in the context of appropriation as an art practice.
About the presenterMary K. Brantl
An Associate Professor in Art History at St. Edward’s University, Austin, TX, Mary Brantl (Ph.D.—NYU, 1998) teaches across the discipline of art history as well as history of and issues in photography. Her teaching and scholarship are focused on modern art—often in the area of documentary photography. The result has been a series of projects centered on immigrant photographers (several shared at MAPACA in recent years) as well as on the postmodern image-maker’s rhetorical tools.