Double Take

Book excerpt: A compelling combination of photography, cultural history, and philosophical geography, Double Take presents more than seventy photographic pairs - each a distinctive "then" and "now" view of the same location - that document more than a century of change in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. Presented side-by-side, the dramatic transformations comprise one of the most ambitious and exacting urban rephotography surveys ever undertaken. Celebrated Wisconsin photographer Zane Williams has meticulously replicated the original views of an earlier Madison photographer, Angus McVicar, who first shot these locales from the 1920s to the 1950s. The result is a rich archive of historic and contemporary images and a provocative examination into the nature of change in a mid-sized American city.