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.
