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Many of the images in the Walter C. Lowdermilk collection at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library come from Huajialing 华家岭 in Gansu Province 甘肃省's Tongwei County 通渭县, where Lowdermilk took numerous pictures of terraced slopes and gullies.You can view a set of those photographs, which also contains some images of Rewi Alley's Bailie Vocational Institute and the Yellow River crossing near Lanzhou 兰州,  by clicking the link below.Walter C. Lowdermilk Lanzhou and Huajialing, Gansu PhotographsDuring September 2019, after visiting Fudan University 复旦大学, attending a major conference at East China Normal University 华东师范大学, and taking part in the annual UC San Diego-ECNU graduate student workshop, I took several of our PhD students from UC San Diego to Lanzhou the work in the Gansu provincial library and archives.[Photo by Xi Chen]During that trip, we also visited Huajialing to try to do repeat photography (taking multiple photographs of the same subject, from the same location, at different times) at the sites where Lowdermilk took his photos in 1943 as a way to illustrate landscape change over time.[Photo by Guannan Gao][Photo by Benjamin Kletzer]In the actual event, identifying the exact places at which Lowdermilk took his pictures more than seven decades ago proved extremely difficult and when I do this kind of repeat photography in the future it will require extended fieldwork in close collaboration with local experts (or perhaps creative use of crowdsourcing).Regardless, a comparison between Lowdermilk's 1943 photographs and a few of the ones we took in summer 2019 is a suggestive way of grasping general patterns of landscape change in the Huajialing area.Among the most obvious differences here is the existence of wind turbines along the top of plateaus, since Huajialing is currently the site of a major wind power farm.[Photo by Benjamin Kletzer][Photo by Benjamin Kletzer][Photo by Benjamin Kletzer][Photo by Benjamin Kletzer]