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 locations of historical nineteenth-century photographs of the American West made for government sponsored surveys in the 1860s and 70s and to duplicate those images by making new photographs from the same locations.

Previous to our project, "repeat photographs" were made by scientists to compare changes over time to the subjects of earlier photographs. The methods geologists used to accurately find the exact locations of landscape photographs formed the basis for our work, and we attempted to extend thier methods both technically and conceptually. In the RSP, "rephotography" meant accurately repeating an original photograph’s camera position, its visual composition, framing, time of year, and time of day while also acknowledging the participation of the photographer in making choices that influence the ways photographs may be interpreted. The RSP tried to duplicate the physical characteristics of the original photograph while also acknowledging the complex circumstances that photographs are made and viewed under.

The project was based on curiosity about how lands have changed over a hundred years of human intervention, what could be learned about how historical photographers worked and made their images, and with an interest in conceptual art practices. Urban growth, mining sites, and water impoundments formed the most profound physical changes to the lands we rephotographed. By contrast, in remote locations we sometimes found very little had changed. We learned that historical photographers had specific points of view, and we could sometimes predict where they would set up their cameras to make their photographs.

The project had three field seasons and photographers Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus contributed to the project during the second and third years. Altogether, 122 sites were rephotographed in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico. The RSP’s work was typically shown in diptych format, with the historic photograph reproduced on the left, and the rephotograph on the right. The project’s book, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project, was published in 1984.

In 1997, the Third View Project revisited many of the RSP the sites and used new technologies to explore rephotographic methods and ways to visualize rephotographs.