Repeat glacier photographs have become popular icons for current environmental movements that frequently use retreating glaciers as symbols for global warming. While scholars have critically examined these images to better understand the relationships among ice, social life, and environmental discourse, few studies have treated glacier photography itself as a historically evolving practice. This essay does so, following archival photographs taken on Alaskan glaciers in the early twentieth century. It argues that behind the present uses of glacier images as environmentalist icons lies a more complex history in which the epistemic value of glacier photography vacillated over the course of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, repeat photography was no longer deemed scientifically informative for understanding glaciers. Instead, the camera turned toward capturing new modes of glacier research, effectively documenting its own irrelevance as a scientific tool. The history of repeat glacier photography, then, is not one of pure ascendency but of discontinuity and rupture.
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