摘要：Rephotography is the practice of retracing the location depicted in an old photograph and taking a new image from the exact same perspective. The two photographs are then combined within the same photographic frame. Originally used in scientific surveys, rephotography is now a widely popular trend, featuring a variety of technologies. In this article I employ the idea of the ruin to conceptualise rephotography’s potential to expose the temporality of space and the spatiality of time. First, I relate Walter Benjamin’s theory of the ruin to his notion of photography and introduce the notion of the photograph as a ruin of the event that it captures. Subsequently, with reference to Mark Klett’s pioneering work I explore how rephotography spatialises this past event and transforms corresponding details of the physical environment into ruins. Finally, I examine rephotography’s performative and affective dimensions through two popular blogs, Dear Photograph and Link to the Past, that feature different techniques of layering images.
