Capturing the West – Then & Now

Professor embarks on photographic surveys that explore western landscapes, cultural evolution, and new perspectives

by taran march

During the 1860s and ’70s, groups of photographers, geologists, botanists, and painters set out to document major Western landscapes for the U.S. Geological Survey. Among the photographers were William Henry Jackson, A.J. Russell, Carleton Watkins, and Timothy O’Sullivan, whose images, wrested from hand-mixed chemicals and glass plates, did much to establish the technological myth that photographs were an accurate reflection of the world.

Some 130 years later, Byron Wolfe, photographer and California State University, Chico assistant professor in communication design, is working both to substantiate and disprove that theory. Along with Mark Klett, regents professor of art at Arizona State University, he’s revisited and rephotographed more than 110 sites documented during the first geological survey. Changes in technology and an intellectual shift in our relationship with nature have brought an entirely new perspective to the otherwise faithfully reproduced images.

“This kind of work exists in a lot of different realms,” says Wolfe. “It’s scholarly to some extent, because it’s almost as much about the history of photography as it is about a particular place. But it’s also a form of investigation. It’s about asking questions—what’s going on in the places in which we live, how have they changed or stayed the same?”

Western Landscapes at the Millennium

The results of their four-year effort, known as the Third View project, will be co-published in fall 2004 as a book and CD-ROM by the Center for American Places and the Museum of New Mexico, both in Santa Fe. The project’s related and elegantly interactive Web site, www.thirdview.org/3v/home, was designed by Wolfe and Johnny Poon, CSU, Chico information technology consultant. It serves as a research tool where interested armchair surveyors can view the “rephotographs” and read the fieldnotes kept by project writer William Fox.

An important dimension to the project, one that distinguishes it from the original geological survey as well as Klett’s Second View Rephotographic Survey project that occurred in the late 1970s, was the introduction of people and the objects they bring to a place.

“What’s going on outside the picture might be more interesting than what’s going on inside,” says Wolfe. “We were interested in dealing with that. We made 360-degree panoramas and conducted audio and video interviews. We’d collect artifacts—junk—that people had thrown out. But it was stuff that connected to that place and to our experience and other kinds of human experience in an interesting way.”

Rephotography makes a distinction between duplicating an existing and earlier photograph—impossible in any case after 130 years—and “positioning the camera lens at the same point in space as the original photo” while matching the time of year, time of day, and quality of light.

“Rephotography derives from a practice in geology called repeat photography, which helps scientists understand geologic changes over time,” says Wolfe. “There’s a very precise working methodology to locating a point in space, but what you end up with is completely unpredictable. You may see a 19th-century picture with some sort of settlement, and in the 20th or 21st century, it’s gone. Sometimes the pictures may look virtually identical and vary only by the kind of technology involved. Whatever the case, it all comes from asking a question as simple as, ‘I wonder what’s changed?’ ”

Klett, Third View’s project director, was a geologist before turning to landscape photography. His work on the Second View project was largely responsible for legitimizing rephotography. Second View, the book that resulted, was published in 1990 by University of New Mexico Press.

Wolfe, a freshly graduated evolutionary biologist in 1989 and a passionate photographer [“I had to put away my cameras so I could get through college”] came across the book, and on the strength of it ended up studying with Klett and earning an M.F.A. in photogra different photographers who’d worked in the same place, at the same time showing how each represented the place in a different way.”

The image at the top of this page, Four Views from Four Times and One Shoreline, Lake Tenaya connects, from left to right, an 1872 picture by Muybridge, a 1942 image by Adams, and a 1937 photo by Weston, all three set against a back panel made by Klett and Wolfe that bridges the other photographers’ separate frames. This photo and others equally intriguing from the Yosemite project are currently displayed as part of Chico Museum’s Yosemite Remembered exhibit that will run through June.

A Year in a Life

Wolfe’s new solo photo essay, Everyday, a thoughtful selection of 365 photographs begun on his 35th birthday in the summer of 2002, represents a personal survey of change, one whose pace embraces the daily heartbeats in a single year.

“These are pictures very much about my personal experience, things I’m looking at that don’t necessarily get attention,” says Wolfe. “I discovered that photography is a lot like haiku poetry in that you’re really trying to distill a place, an experience, down to the single emblematic thing. It might be a really tiny thing, but when it works, it opens up to this other, greater experience. Thematically, too, a lot of the things I looked at were similar to haiku themes—changes in the seasons, animals, kids.”

Like the Yosemite project, written text provided an essential element to the visual stories. “My intention with using text was to emphasize experience rather than objectively recorded objects,” he says. “The picture might suggest that you’re looking at one thing, but the caption tells you something else. In some instances, I think the picture becomes the caption for the text.”

Everyday found appreciative viewers at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. It made the publisher’s shortlist for the center’s First Book Prize, awarded annually to an unpublished photographer, and Wolfe was recently nominated by the Sante Fe Center for Photography for the Santa Fe Prize for Photography, which recognizes and rewards a gifted and committed photographer who has completed a meaningful body of work. He also received a CSU, Chico Research Foundation grant to pay for the ink and paper that will transform his digital images into bound sample copies. These he’ll shop around to potential publishers.

“All these projects ponder bigger questions like, What should a practicing artist be doing?” says Wolfe. “Does he or she have a responsibility to the community? Ultimately, I’m interested in trying to come up with interesting questions and following them wherever they go.”

About the Author

Taran March (B.A., English, ’89) is a freelance writer and editor in Cherokee, California.

Third View Fieldnotes, 7/4/98–Logan Springs, Nevada

7:00 am: Everyone more or less gets up at the same time. Mark locates the place from which to recreate O’Sullivan’s original vantage point—only after which can coffee be made.

We wait until 10:30 for the light to fall roughly along the cliff as it had for the first photograph almost 125 years ago. In the meantime we take turns exploring a nearby stone house. The original purpose of the town is unclear to us—no mines, logging operations, or corrals are visible. The house, its ceiling taking a slow entropic dive onto a floor of decaying shag carpet squares, is full of religious tracts, political advertisements, and women’s stockings.

Mark makes his shots in Polaroid black-and-white, the regular b&w and color negative films, seven mi-nutes of shooting after three hours of waiting. O’Sullivan’s mid-19th-century technology collapses into the late 20th century as Mark begins to document local artifacts with a palm-sized digital camera.

The sense of multiple times folding into each other multiplies as chert flakes from Neolithic tools turn up next to shiny brass 30.06 rifle casings. An exquisitely eroded book found inside the houses and brought outside for documenting says it all: “Our Nation at Dead Center” reads the top of the verso page, “Exercises and Activities” reads the recto. Byron holds up a square and wafer-thin record to the sky, the grooves of the transparent text of religious homilies shot through with sunlight.

1:00 pm: We leave the site to backtrack down to Shaman Hill for lunch where, pecked into desert varnish, the ghostly figure of a Pahranagat Man petroglyph hovers on a nearby rock face. Another couple of prehistoric millennia are absorbed seamlessly into the project.

4:00 pm: The drive from Crystal Springs to Tonopah takes the Extraterrestrial Highway through Rachel, a mandatory stop. UFOs adorn the sides of the gas pumps, and Mark finds a bleached dollar bill in the noxious halogeten weeds by the mini-mart. Two adjacent signs in the window proclaim hopefully, if not disingenuously: “Guided Tours” and “Area 51.”

7:30 pm: While Stu struggles upstairs in one of our two hotel rooms to get us online, the rest of us fill a corner booth downstairs in the restaurant for dinner. It’s a long-distance call in any direction, we decide.

“Tonopah:” muses Byron as he stares out the window, “centrally isolated.”

11:00 pm: Everyone’s hunched over the three desktops and two notebooks finishing the daily edits. This is new territory for the crew, simultaneously editing still, digital, and video images for the Web and a CD-ROM. Image degradation drives them nuts—moving pictures from a camera to a computer, compressing the images to go onto the Web, each step tending to bleed out skies, deepen shadows, and delete details. I point out that a stranger coming into the room would think he had stumbled into a sci-fi conspiracy.