Second view: the rephotographic survey project. - book reviews

STEWART BRAND: A book that justifies having a coffee table, a book that will grow in value with the decades. The subject is time. The method is "rephotography" -- the exact reshooting of historic photographs with modern research and camera work. The effect: you lear to feel and observe like a mountainside.

At first I was disappointed that the modern photographers chose 120 government survey photographs of the 1870s and 1880s to work with -- Timothy O'Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, etc. -- since their images so dominantly, and magnificently, geological. I thought more ephemeral subjects would be more revealing -- cityscapes, farmland, and such. But in a century obsessed with change, it is lovely to see change put in its place. Second View teaches respect for rocks, disrespect for human projects.

And it introduces rephotography as an astonishing technique for insight into place. Try it in your place.

COPYRIGHT 1985 Point Foundation
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