Visions (and revisions) of grandeur

IN the summer of 2001, writer Rebecca Solnit and photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe did what nearly 4 million people do every year: They visited Yosemite. It was the first of five extended expeditions into the national park taken over three years -- “a fishing trip,” Solnit called their initial outing, “an expedition to find out what was there and what we could make of it.”

The agenda was actually more purposeful. Loaded with cameras, film, piles of photographs, books, checklists, maps and coolers of food, they car-camped, bushwhacked and mosquito-swatted their way into the past, tracking down the precise locations where Carleton E. Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, among others, stood with their tripods when they immortalized the region’s granite walls and mountain lakes.

It’s called rephotography, and it is nothing new. It made perhaps its most dramatic appearance in 1975 with the publication of William A. Frassanito’s “Gettysburg: A Journey in Time.” A recent example occurred last September when photographers and astronomers gathered at Yosemite’s Glacier Point to revisit the same alignment of earth and sky that Adams captured in his iconic photograph “Autumn Moon” in 1948. For more than 30 years, rephotography has been a popular way for geologists and geographers to study changes in landscape.

“Yosemite in Time,” though, is not an academic exercise. It evokes all the splendor and the pleasure of the valley, a year-round haven for all manner of professional and amateur enthusiasts, and a place that, as Solnit writes, “reminds you that it is bigger and more mysterious than your descriptions, your picture, your theories, your predictions.... “

At Yosemite, perhaps one of the most photographed places in the world, rephotography allows us to see the park anew, stripped of its aesthetic sheen and timeless familiarity. In the end, even John Muir and Adams, who by themselves have largely determined our impressions of the valley -- and arguably deadened them -- are set aside.

Beautifully produced, “Yosemite in Time” juxtaposes the classic photographs of the cliffs, waterfalls and lakes with contemporary views. These then-and-now images are doors to the past, where every detail -- a stone, a tree, a shadow, a cloud -- eloquently evokes both transience and eternity.

Looking out from the old Mariposa Trail, you marvel at how much more lush the valley is today than it was a century ago (mostly due to fire containment). In the shadow of the Three Brothers, you discern the former bed of the Merced River. On Sugar Loaf’s granite flanks, you can pick out 18 trees still standing after 131 years and, near Lake Tenaya, a line of boulders undisturbed for nearly the same amount of time.

But the most remarkable accomplishment of “Yosemite in Time” is the compilation of panoramic sequences by Klett and Wolfe. Having determined that Watkins, Muybridge, Weston and Adams had at various times stood in almost the same places to take their pictures, Klett and Wolfe cobbled together images to create wide-angle views of the park that conjure up not just space but time. One print of Lake Tenaya, for instance, titled “Four views from four times and one shoreline, Lake Tenaya, 2002,” incorporates sepia, black-and-white and color photographs taken in 1872, 1937, 1942 and 2002; to gaze at this stunning image is to fall back into each singular epoch.

Part of the fun of “Yosemite in Time” is in relishing the collaboration among Klett, Wolfe and Solnit. Not only are the three of them dogged in their determination to find the exact camera placement, traipsing through thickets of manzanita (with a few choice words for Muybridge) or battling the branches of a scrub oak for just the right glimpse of, say, Moonlight Rock, but they also clearly enjoy one another’s insights.

In her three accompanying essays, which exhibit the same profound and playful inquiry and anecdotal reporting that have made her one of the most provocative writers about the West, Solnit quotes the e-mails and observations of her partners (whose backgrounds in geology and evolutionary biology seem particularly fitted for this project) just as often as she does the apercus of such luminaries as John Berger, Jean Baudrillard and Jorge Luis Borges.

Solnit is particularly fascinated with Muybridge, who was the subject of her recent book “River of Shadows” and whose study of the 19th century “industrialization of time and space” resonates today. In the first essay, she remarks that Muybridge, “in his photographs of the Indian Wars, of glacial traces, of water, of ruins, with his penchant for sequences, series, and panoramas, was always playing with what time looked like in photography, with what photography could make of time.”

Time -- the perception of time -- is Solnit’s quarry, and the High Sierra provides her with a backdrop to consider larger forces at play: the cyclical nature of life and its terminal realities. Reconciling the two is the stuff of religion or philosophy, but Solnit finds her answer in the Merced River. The linear notion of time is as deceptive, she argues, as a river flowing continuously forward. Eddies, backwaters and tributaries are analogous to our memories, to our imaginations -- to the rephotographs of our mind.

”...[T]ime was not a single river,” she writes, “but something always branching into every possible outcome; time was a tree growing at infinite speed to produce infinite branches, so that there were many pasts and more presents and this very moment is begetting many futures.”

Solnit’s understanding of nature -- and of Yosemite -- is less nostalgic, rarified and subjective than that of other interpreters, be they the artists of the Hudson River School or the photographers following Adams’ and Weston’s footsteps. And her vision of the valley is more inclusive than Muir’s, whose writings ignore its richly complicated human history, or Adams’, whose prints are classically austere and spare. She includes the most innocent incursions, such as a discarded children’s toy found at the Wawona Tunnel overlook, and the most judgmental comments, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s in the 1930s: “The whole world is falling to pieces, and Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”

Yosemite’s history, she writes, is “about ecology, aesthetics and ethics, and often the place becomes a mirror reflecting back a whole nation’s wrestlings with time and place and race.” This capacious view lets her see Yosemite as the province of many cultures -- a notion perhaps lost to us when the Ahwahneechee were forcibly removed from the region in 1851.

Solnit’s thoughtful commentary and Klett and Wolfe’s photographs remind us that the world is not defined by one experience or one point of view. Yosemite in their eyes is as populated with ghosts as it is with tourists. By adjusting the clock between past and present, they have pushed us beyond a purely visual aesthetic.

Seeing is never a passive act. Informed by history and memory, it is interpretation -- and interpretation captures the sacred, totemistic and ritual meaning of such places as this valley in the High Sierra. *