JULY/AUGUST 2019. DISCOVER 97
servant). Higgs’ grad students found them while
investigating gaps in the Jasper prints, exploring
equivalent photos from a neighboring park. The
whole collection numbered 120,000 images, neatly
preserved in 300 large boxes.
Higgs couldn’t let the opportunity pass him by, and
he immediately started retaking some of the photos.
“We’ve done around 8,000 repeat images over the
past 20 years,” he says. The large-format film camera
has been retired, supplanted by digital photography.
Google Earth and GPS technologies get the photog-
raphers to the right spot, typically within a meter of
where the original surveyor once looked through his
lens. On the ground, the rephotographers — mostly
students now — often see remnants of the original
surveys, including fabric from century-old flags.
Yet even with modern technology, Higgs says it’s
common to experience “repeat photography ver-
tigo, where you’re standing in a location and you’re
pretty sure you’re in the right location, but nothing
looks the same.” In some cases, the overgrowth is so
extreme that the view is blocked, or the spot itself
proves inaccessible.
It soon became clear that the growing density
and homogeneity of mountain forest isn’t unique
to Jasper. Higgs believes the mosaic of older and
newer growth seen in the early survey photos is likely
a combination of natural climate effects as well as fire
management practices by indigenous peoples.
“We’re looking at how we might partner with indig-
enous communities to bring some of these patterns
back to the landscape,” he says. More broadly, he and
his colleagues are attempting for the Canadian Rockies
what Hastings and Turner originally sought to achieve
in the Sonoran Desert: studying whole ecosystems
with open minds. In some cases, they’re finding sur-
prises — such as new biodiversity taking root around
abandoned mountain coal mines — prompting studies
that might otherwise never have been imagined.
“Repeat photography has really informed how I
think about the nature of change,” says Higgs. “It’s
made me think about how and why we restore, and
what that’s going to look like in a changing world.”
More than just a window to the past, repeat photog-
raphy provides a lens through which to scope out the
environment of the future.^ D
Jonathon Keats is a contributing editor at Discover.
“Repeat
photo-
graphy
has really
informed
how I
think
about the
nature of
change.”
— Eric Higgs,
ecologistTH
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Jasper National
Park’s Athabasca
Glacier, in 1917
and 2011.