www.zanewilliamsphotography.com/sdouble.htm -
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Published on: 9/15/2007
Last Visited: 9/15/2007
Local photographer Zane Williams spent the last five years taking pictures for his new book, Double Take, a meticulous rephotographic survey of Madison published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
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Williams emphasized these changes by precisely "rephotographing" McVicar's urban images, using the same vantage points and matching the seasonal conditions of natural light.He also worked with his head under the black hood of a view-style camera, which produced black-and-white negatives that reproduced the tonality of McVicar's original photographs.
Williams used 72 pairs of the technically identical then-and-now photographs for his book.
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Now in his 50s, Williams has lived much of his adult life in the First Settlement Neighborhood just east of the Capitol Square.
The oldest parts of the city stretch out before the windows of his restored 19th-century home, and many of the old buildings McVicar's commercial customers paid to have photographed are just beyond his doorstep.
And although Williams is not a Madison native (he came here for college in 1967 and stayed), years of making photographs of the central city have bonded him to what architectural historians would call Madison's "built landscape."
His friend and fellow photographer Greg Conniff says that much of the Madison photography Williams has done comes from a deep love of place.
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"Zane isn't going to be making any money on Double Take," he says.
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Rephotographers often use images taken by a variety of earlier photographers, but Williams only uses photographs culled from the large archive of McVicar's work.And thanks to the survival of McVicar's logbooks, Williams had all the information needed to recapture the visual qualities of the earlier photographs.
That hadn't been the case with other urban surveys of this type.Williams admits that such careful duplication of McVicar's views obscures some of his own ideas about the direction his city has taken over the last 75 years.But that doesn't bother him; in this project, he prefers showing over telling."This framework isn't absolutely neutral," says Williams, as he gazes upon a wall in his home office that's covered with uncut pages of Double Take."But it's about as neutral a framework as I can think of, looking at then and now.
Trying to gauge, as objectively as possible, the quantity and the quality of change."Independent curator Tom Garver, who is one of Williams' more passionate contributing essayists, says that the attention Williams paid to the original photographs assures that viewers of his photographic pairs would be led to a close examination of the finest details of facades, buildings and entire blocks that were in transition even during the first decades of the 1900s.
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Williams pairs his contemporary photograph of the boxy, unadorned Woolworth's (which should be completely demolished by the time you read this) with McVicar's 1934 view of the attractive 19th-century opera house and the impressively proportioned limestone city hall that it had replaced.
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Williams quickly agreed to the idea, and with help from Holzhueter (who also wrote the captions for the photographs and served as Williams' editorial consultant), the final structure of the book took shape.
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Williams quickly agreed to the idea, and with help from Holzhueter (who also wrote the captions for the photographs and served as Williams' editorial consultant), the final structure of the book took shape.
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In his introduction to Double Take, Williams says, "Seeing and knowing a place requires spending time in it, paying careful attention, looking at both the details and the larger picture.
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Bound by McVicar's commercial choices, Williams also shot the block from below in 1999.But he didn't have to worry about idealizing any of its architectural elements.
By then the heights of the remaining buildings had been altered.
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It's a testament to the power of Williams' project that the original picture "means" so much more when it's placed in a pair with a technically identical rephotograph.
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In another decade, much of what McVicar and Williams have photographed may be gone.
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A few years ago, Zane Williams, a contemporary Madison photographer, looked at McVicar's collection and decided to recreate it.
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