Third Views, Second Sights book and DVD publication by Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron Wolfe.
Third View project participants revisited the sites of historic western American landscape photographs. We made new photographs, kept a field diary of our travels, and collected materials useful in interpreting the scenes, change and the passage of time. The project work is disseminated with a book, an interactive DVD, a web site, and ongoing exhibitions.
Over the course of four years (1997 - 2000) the project revisited 109 historic landscape sites, all subjects of nineteenth-century American western survey photographs. The "rephotographs" were made from the originals’ vantage points with as much precision as possible. Every attempt was also made to duplicate the original photographs' lighting conditions, both in time of day and year.
Third View was created specifically to investigate changes that have occurred since the landscape sites were last photographed, a time period ranging from twenty to one hundred and thirty years. In most cases there are three photographs at each site, but Third View includes over a dozen sites that had not been rephotographed previously and in those cases there are only two views presented.
Here's a streaming QuickTime video (3:00 minutes, 15.3 megabytes) that takes you on a whirlwind tour of a small portion of the material on the interactive DVD.
The web site has animated rephotography of 19th century landscape photographs, downloadable pdfs of rephotographed sites, fieldnotes, and a bibliograpy. There's also an interactive simulation describing the basic tools and techniques we use when making a rephotograph.