Composite by Sergei Larenkov - A photo from the 3-year Seige of Leningrad from 1941-1944 merged with an image of the same location in contemporary St. Petersburg

Matt sent along a link to these interesting composite images of St. Petersburg/Leningrad made by combining photos from the 1941-44 Leningrad Blockade and contemporary photos of the same locations. There’s a lot to see at englishrussia.com, though if I remember right from when I last looked at the site a few years ago, the posts can sometimes be a little NSFW or come from an odd-feeling gawking perspective. Regardless, these pictures are worth a quick look, as are these archival (noncomposite) photos from the Seige.

The pictures brought to mind a few other projects I’ve seen that fall more clearly under the genre of “Rephotography.” While the photos, the rephotographed ones, aren’t always interesting as pictures in and of themselves, the exercise often produces interesting studies in anthropology and urban design.

From Rephotographing Atget - Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple, 1898, Eugene Atget / Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple, 1997, Christopher Rauschenberg

Christopher Rauschenberg‘s project “Rephotographing Atget”, in which 1997-8′s Paris is held next to the Paris between 1888 and 1927. The work was collected in a book, “Paris Changing,” published in 2007. On Rauschenberg’s website, he’s also published a gallery of images he feels are in the spirit of Atget’s imagery. Photographer Gerald M. Panter looks to have done just about the same thing. His rephotographs were made a little earlier than Rauschenberg’s, though they haven’t enjoyed the same recognition.

From New York Changing - Bowling Green, foot of Broadway - L: Berenice Abbot (1936), R: Douglas Lavere (1997)

And Douglas Levere has given the “Changing” treatment to Berenice Abbot’s 1930s pictures of New York City. The book “New York Changing” (Amazon)collects his photographs of scenes throughout the city alongside the earlier pictures. The Morning News published a short interview about the project and pictures in 2005.

Another such body of work is David W. Dunlap’s “Then/Now” series, pairing images he took for an illustrated guidebook in 1978 with rephotographs from 2008. Make sure to drag the slider in the middle of the images. Great (and thankfully judicious) use of flash design that. In a similar vein, Damon Winter photographed a project for the the New York Times called “Neighbors” in which he used double exposures to show the diversity of neighborhoods and areas of New York City; not quite rephotography, but close enough.