It was Mark Klett who pioneered and refined the art of rephotography. In 1977, Klett, with Ellen Manchester and JoAnn Verburg, began the Rephotographic Survey Project. This located the vantage points of iconic 19th-century photographs of the American West (eg., those by Timothy O'Sullivan and W.H. Jackson) and meticulously reframed these views from a century ago.

The new photographs were published alongside the originals in Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984). Informed by Klett’s training as a geologist and his reaction to the New Topographics exhibition, Second View is deemed to represent the human interaction with the landscape and, as a result, it highlights the different time scales of human development and geologic change.

The above images are from From Second View. On the left is William Henry Jackson, 1873, “Moraines on Clear Creek, Valley of the Arkansas, Colorado." [U.S. Geological Survey]. On the Right is Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg for the Rephotographic Survey Project, 1977, “Clear Creek Reservoir, Colorado.”

The nineteenth-century surveys, which were led by scientists like Clarence King or military men like George Wheeler, were not strictly photographic surveys; they were geographical and geological surveys that took photographers along. Klett and Co basically honed in on the photographers they admired and they followed in their footsteps and in doing so they showed the long-term changes that we normally never see.