re-photography assignment (an exploration of everyday spaces)
Due: March 16
Value: 25%

In Steve Edwards’ book we learn that photography is a complex set of social and technical interactions that has had a revolutionary impact on the way that people interact with one another and with the world in general; taking a picture is never a simple act of snapping the shutter.  In this assignment you are asked to reflect not only on the act of taking a picture but also on the act of taking a picture over again.  The practice of taking a picture that has already been taken is called repeat photography or simply re-photography.  Repeat photography is not only a way of thinking about photography (and photographic histories, gazes, etc.) but it can also be a powerful technique in the analysis ‘place’ and its social construction.

In this course we take photography as one of the key technologies for representing the world today.  It is a transformative but it is also continuously being negotiated.  One thing we can say about photography with some certainty is that the photographs most definitive quality is its indexicality, the way that it points to the absolutely specific and particular.  In this specificity, the photograph reproduces and reconfigures our experience of time and place.  In this assignment we are concerned particularly with place and with the way that places are made meaningful by everyday patterns of use, misuse, and disuse.

What you need to do:

• Find a public area — a space where people gather or pass through.  Winston Churchill square, Whyte avenue, the local 7-11, etc.
• Find an historic photograph (one that is more than twenty years old).
• Produce a visual exploration of the ‘scene’ or the place.  Using your experience from scrapbook assignments 1 – 3 you need to go into this site of everyday experience with your camera as a supplement to your vision.
• Try to reproduce the photograph you have found.
  • For the scrapbook you may also consider extending your study of the place you have chosen with more photographs. (could be more detailed, more specific, could be pictures of trash, or the sidewalk, or a detailed picture of a storefront window.
• Map the site in google maps and upload both the original photograph and the photograph that you have taken to reproduce it.
• Take care not to shoot identifying shots of people in the picture.  We will share these in class (you will work in small groups to present what you have and try to imaging other ways of representing your site.).
• You will be graded on the following:
  • 1. Two photographs and a 200-300 word ‘caption’ on google maps
  • 2. A written study making explicit use of course materials (through references and quotations) situating your exploration and ‘analysis’ of the place.  This should bebetween 1000 and 1500 words.

References should follow the APA or MLA styles (the main thing is that you are consistent in the style that you use).  See this website for more details:

http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/citations.html#mla

resources:

Smith, Trudi. 2007. Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology. Visual Anthropology 20, no. 2/3 (March): 179-200.