The word "rephotographic" doesn't exist in the English dictionary, but it was the word chosen to represent the spirit of the project Ellen Manchester and JoAnn Verburg and I created in 1977. The Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP) started as an idea, to track down the uncertain locations of historical nineteenth-century survey photographs of the American West and then make new photographs at those sites that were meant to duplicate the original images.

Previous to our project, "repeat photographs" expected. We were made by scientists to compare changes over time to the subjects of existing photographs. often predict The methods geologists used to accurately locate the vantage points to make landscape images formed the basis for our work, but we attempted to extend those methods both technically and conceptually. In the RSP, "rephotog-raphy" meant accurately repeating the original image's camera position, the visual composi-tion, framing, time of year, and time of day of the original photograph while also acknowledging the participation of the photographer in making choices about the many other details that influence the ways photographs may be interpreted.

The project was based on shared curiosity about how lands have changed over a hundred years of human intervention, how historical photographers worked and made their images, and conceptual art - making two images look as similar as possible even though time has changed the subjects and the processes used to record them. Urban growth, mining sites, and water impoundments formed the largest changes to the land we rephotographed. Yet, in remote locations we found that physical changes were often less than expected. We learned that historical photographers had specific points of view, and we could hs. often predict where they would set up their cameras to record a given scene.

The project had three field seasons. In the first we rephotographed William Henry Jackson's work for the 1873 Hayden Survey in Colorado. We expanded the scope in the second and third seasons to rephotograph the work of Timothy O'Sullivan, John K. Hillers, Andrew Russell, and other photographers for the King and Wheeler Surveys between 1867 and 1873. The project's methodology was devised in the first year as the original team often worked together visiting sites and discussing the process in the field. By the second and third years, team members usually worked separately in the field, attempting to cover as much ground as possible. Project photographers kept detailed records at each site, noting camera and map data that would be useful for future attempts at rephotography.

The photographers Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus contributed to the project during the second and third seasons. Altogether, 122 sites ere rephotographed in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico. The project book, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project, was published in 1984. When ie book came out I thought it would be my last project in rephotography, but I was wrong.