Brett Leigh Dicks shuffles his feet and tripod slightly to find the exact spot where another photographer stood 100 years earlier.

Metaphorically, it’s the same amount of digging, just a different kind.

Mr Dicks, a Fremantle-based photographer, is artist in residence at WA’s Museum of the Goldfields.

He is recreating photographs taken between the 1890s and the 1920s by two photographers, John Joseph Dwyer and Thomas Faulkner Mackay, who had a studio on Kalgoorlie’s main street.

On the Goldfields’ dusty streets, he looks for four-walled relics.

Some of the buildings portrayed in the Dwyer-Mackay collection are easy finds, federation-style landmarks that shape the cityscape, like the York Hotel, a St Mark’s Basilica of the outback.

But locating anonymous houses requires some digging, using tools as old as telephone records from the 20s and 30s, or as modern as Google Earth.

He looks for distinguishing elements, details that can help identification, following clues that survived time.

Even reflections in the windows of buildings opposite the road are markers.

In their footsteps

It’s a grey afternoon in the Goldfields. The light, filtered through the clouds, is soft on the rounded façade of the Palace Theatre.

It’s the light Mr Dicks needs to recreate Mackay’s picture.

He scribbled in his notebook it was taken on an overcast afternoon, as he wants the new pictures to be shot under the same conditions of the original ones: same angle, perspective and lighting conditions.

Sometimes that means rolling a wheelie bin out of frame, waiting for an orange car to zoom past or reschedule the shooting because you find the site cordoned off by forensic detectives.

Mr Dicks says photography is subjective, a personal view of an objective reality.

But this project puts the photographer, quite literally, in someone else’s footsteps. 

Delegating every choice — from framing to timing — to Dwyer and Mackay gives him insight into their work.

“One of the things that’s really come to light is that John Joseph Dwyer wasn’t a morning person,” Mr Dicks laughs.

A reflection of the past

This comparative study reveals more than the preferences of a photographer who lived at the turn of the last century. It illustrates how society evolved.

Mr Dicks’s lens is magnifying — exposing by contrast — the changes that shaped architecture and lives.

“Towns and cities will change given the needs of society,” he says.

It is apparent in the disappearance of laundries, draperies, and tailors, replaced by today’s big-box stores.

Mr Dicks says these changes are enlightening, but he can’t help getting a little romantic looking at those old pictures and lamenting what has been lost.

He is struck by the absence of large areas for social gathering in his pictures. They have vanished, or been turned into museum pieces.

“We seem to have lost that, social interaction has gone online.”

He believes these old and new photos, put side by side, give a few hints for the future.

But the Australian-American photographer also thinks his work should make the community feel proud that many of the buildings photographed in the early 1900s are still standing, and well preserved.

“In America, the downtown is decaying, forgotten. The centre of town moved to the outskirts, in box stores,” Mr Dicks says. 

Overseas, he got used to the occasional door being shut on his face, but, in the Goldfields, he found them all open.

Continuing conversations

The public’s interest in the project inspired Mr Dicks to involve the community. He asked people to respond with poems to selected portraits.

He wants others to continue the dialogue he started with Dwyer and Mackay, now, and in the future.

“I hope this project becomes a continuing conversation,” Mr Dicks says.

He likes to picture someone else, in 100 years from now, standing in his footsteps, chasing the same angle and the same light of this grey afternoon.