When Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci arrived in the New World in 1499, he came upon huts constructed on stilts along the shore. Recalling his home country, he dubbed the settlement Little Venice, or what is now better known as Venezuela. This geographic swapping is an example of what photographers Andrea Robbins and Max Becher call "the transportation of place" in their recent book of that name.

While the husband-and-wife duo do not focus on 15th-century colonialism, the legacy of imperialism is apparent in many of their investigations. In Namibia, they photograph the German-style churches and shops built between 1884 and 1916, and in Cuba they document the 1930s buildings modeled after New York's Wall Street and the US Capitol. The photographers' work evinces a cultural and geographic déjà vu, in which the traveler seems to have backtracked or somehow wound up somewhere incomprehensible — in a Shangri-La or Atlantis.

Their best-known series, "German Indians," presents German citizens obsessed with Native Americans. Dressed in feathered headdresses and lounging in teepees, the participants often mix styles of various tribes, upsetting any notion of authenticity or originality. The group of full-length portraits and headshots — reminiscent of the ethnographic photos by Edward S. Curtis — are at once sincere and goofball.

Often using distant vantage points and working in series, Robbins and Becher evoke the style of "new topographics" photographers like Lewis Baltz (Max Becher is the son of another photography couple, the influential Bernd and Hilla Becher). Unlike that of their predecessors, the pair's work is rife with wit and humor. It's hard to ignore the quixotic aspects of American-style strip malls in France, or towns in Michigan and Washington that have transformed their downtown districts into Old World city centers to attract tourism.

Transportation of Place brings to light not just the global homogenization that threatens every country, but also the nuanced and complex history that is common to all.

-Christopher Y. Lew