Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers

by Mark Klett, Rebecca Solnit, Byron G. Wolfe

Yosemite is a world-famous location that has attracted photographic greats like Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, along with environmentalists, mountaineers, and countless tourists. Yosemite in Time puts this landscape and its history in a new perspective, with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe’s original photographs and panoramas, together with rephotographs of some of the most enduring images taken at Yosemite. In three essays, noted critic Rebecca Solnit brings in nature, culture, and politics to look through the past to understand the present. As she writes in her introduction, “Yosemite is a singular place onto which are mapped myriad expectations and desires.” To track many of those designs, Klett, Solnit, and Wolfe made multiple expeditions over three years.

They found the exact points where Muybridge, Weston, and Adams stood to photograph what would become seminal views of a grand landscape; they replicated the exact time of day and year of the earlier photographs in order to get exactly the same angle of light. While Klett and Wolfe brought both precision and invention to their rephotography, Solnit reconstructed the layers of meaning and overlapping ideas entwined with the “steep, intricate, hallowed, scarred landscape of Yosemite.”

Together, the photographs and essays reconsider the iconic status of Yosemite in America’s conception of wilderness, examine how the place was interpreted by early Euro-Americans, and show how our conceptions of landscape have altered and how the landscape has changed―or not―over time. Arresting and incisive, Yosemite in Time explores the environmental and photographic history, science, and politics of a site that has long captured our collective imagination.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Art

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2005

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoy Rebecca Solnit's writing so I picked this book up at the library. Yosemite In Time is a collaboration between Solnit and two photographers, Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe. In 2002 Klett and Wolfe rephotographed many of the iconic images of Yosemite based on the photography of Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams taken from as long ago as the 1860's. Both sets of photos are shown on facing pages giving you a view of how things have changed or not in 150 years. Sometimes the current photo's view is completely obscured by trees, or the riverbed had naturally moved 100 yards to the left. Rebecca adds essays to document the project's course and the ideas and feelings that came out of standing in the exact same place that the original photos were captured from. "Tree Clocks" was my favorite chapter because I loved seeing how the trees in the photos either stayed exactly the same or changed so drastically that they were practically unrecognizable, or not there at all. I got such an awesome sense of how things change but also stay the same. Solnit is so good at conveying ideas with depth and meaning and the photos did the same thing. The talent of the three authors when applied to Yosemite, which is already filled with depth and meaning, really shined.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I think of rephotography, what usually comes to mind are time-lapse images used to show one landscape over the course of a period, or to track a pregnancy from its earliest stages. Solnit and the two photographers she worked with on this project took a different approach, using four famous photographers’ early images of Yosemite, where photography has “a concentrated presence,” as their map. Their actual map: “Mark and Byron were able to find the locations where the various features of a landscape lined up precisely as they did in the photograph and to read from the shadows both what time of day and what time of year it had been made.”

The end goal wasn’t extraordinary images but to capture the ice ages, tree clocks, and ghost rivers of the land by rephotographing the same sites as precisely as possible. The time and effort dedicated to this project is awesome. Solnit knew the geography of Yosemite better than the others, and would be able to weave their conversations about time, place, nature, and dislocation into beautiful essays. Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe were photographers with the patience and skills to determine exactly when a photo from 130 years ago had been taken. Solnit recounts one afternoon where they tracked down the correct location and camera angle, at the right time of the year, for one picture, but then realized they were half an hour too late to get the exact shot. So they didn’t take it (!).

“The exacting art of rephotography produces, among other things, random-looking photographs, since fidelity to place and fidelity to composition are different things. Trees, light, water shift, and sometimes the former view is entirely obscured. To be in the same place and to be in the place where things are more or less the same are not the same thing.”

This precision really appealed to me. And of course the precision of their project was matched with the precision of Solnit’s language. I picked this up because I really like her, and figured a book of photography with a few short accompanying essays would be a quick enough read to bring me closer to my Reading Challenge goal. Instead of racing through it, Solnit drew me in once again, and I found myself lingering over her words and ideas. I was also amused that one of her essays touched on taking things slowly. “As the world comes to resemble a factory more and more, every act of lingering, of deep engagement, of doing nothing, of neither producing nor consuming according to any marketable rate, is a metaphysical work strike for higher pay from the surrounding world.” Point taken.

I’d like to set up camp in her brain and just hang out among her glorious thoughts. Or visit Yosemite with her. Or just see the world from her eyes for a bit. Her writing is just…the best. She talks about difficult, deeply upsetting social issues (she spends much of this book talking about Yosemite’s original inhabitants, whom she also discusses in Savage Dreams A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, and how the beauty of a place isn’t affected by the horrors that have happened there in the past). But it’s always tempered with hope that things are changing, slowly.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was [as if] the real, three-dimensional, full-color landscape of Yosemite was a vast Advent calendar whose photographic sites were windows behind which the past was visible as black-and-white photographs.” In Yosemite In Time, Rebecca Solnit recounts her three journeys through Yosemite with photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, infusing the story of their rephotography project with reflections on the history of the landscape and on the journeys and endeavours of such photographic forebears as Eadweard Muybridge. As ever, Solnit strikes a rewarding balance between a nature narrative and something of a poetic pondering on cultural history.

[Bookwyrmgyrl]

This was a cool book because of the photographs used. Some were taken years and years ago, and some were taken very recently, from the exact same vantage points. Wonderful book to view and read.