Rephotography

Rephotography or repeat photography is the act of photographing the same site twice, with a time lag between the two images; a diachronic, "then and now" view of a particular area.

[15] Three main approaches are common - photographs of places,[16] participants, or activities, functions, or processes – with scholars examining elements of continuity.

[17] 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.

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.

Specific projects include: re.photos, a webportal to create, browse, search, locate, rate, share, and discuss rephotographs;[26] and Retake Melbourne, a crowd-participatory, crowd-funded, mobile app-enabled Deakin University project to rephotograph the fifty-year-old archive of Melbourne (Australia) streetscapes by Mark Strizic.