In 1975, the George Eastman House in Rochester presented the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, which featured the photographs of Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz. This group show marked a turning point in the representation of urban landscapes in photography.

The comparisons these photographers made between contemporary photography and ancient landscapes is implicit. The “rephotographic surveys” consist of taking a photo in the exact same spot as another photo, with the same lens, in order to show man’s impact on urban topography over time. Beginning in the summer of 1977, one of the first and most important works of rephotography was Second View: The Rephotographic Survey. A team of photographers working in the tradition of the New Topographics exhibition was led by the Arizona photographer Mark Klett, who rephotographed the same spots captured on film a century earlier by Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson in the American West. The idea is to take pictures identical to the original by studying the angles, framing, depth of field, etc., and then presenting the photographs side-by-side to show how the landscape has been transformed.

Pauline Auzou

Read the full text of this article in the French version of Le Journal.