Time-lapse/Re-photography

Project Description

This project is currently under development, as I work through my archives from the past six years living and working in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. You can see a sampling of the more than 150 locations that I have continuously visited in the slideshow below. The basic principle of this investigation was two-fold. First, following visual anthropologist John Collier Jr.’s image collection strategy, I aimed to produce a visual inventory of a place. Second, I wanted to push this notion even further, doing what contemporary photographers Mark Klett, Camilo José Vergara, and sociologists like Jon Rieger have called rephotography, the process of systematically returning to locations to photograph as a means towards unpacking processes of social change, such as economic booms and declines, gentrification, etc. As I have extended this project beyond its strictly empirical dimensions, I have begun to theorize it as a case of what urban scholars have begun to identify as the studentification of the city.