by Adelheid Fischer

The United States government launched a series of four large expeditions during the 1860s and 1870s. The goal was to survey the vast resources of the American West. The groups contained scientists, cartographers and men trained in the fledgling art of photography. Among them were such prolific photographers as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.

These photographers were fascinated with the West’s exotic geology and enormous spaces. Their images would define the region in the American imagination for a century to come.

In 1977, Mark Klett and two colleagues set out to retrace their footsteps—literally. Klett is a Regents Professor of Art Arizona State University’s School of Art in the Herberger College of the Arts. They called their endeavor the Rephotographic Survey Project.

Klett and his collaborators spent months collecting maps and tracking down copies of old photographs. With these guides in hand, they lugged large-format view cameras into canyons and onto eroded plugs of freestanding rock.

Once on site, they positioned themselves as closely as possible to the original vantage points of their predecessors before snapping their own views. By the time their journey ended in 1979, the trio had logged thousands of miles into the far-flung corners of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. In sheet after sheet of film, they had recaptured the scenes of more than 120 historic photographs.

The work was interesting, Klett writes. But at the same time it was tedious, demanding, and time-consuming. He says, “I remember thinking: Someone may do this work again someday, but thankfully it won’t be me. So it was with no small dose of personal irony that 20 years later I proposed to visit once again the same sites I gladly walked away from.”

In 1999, with a new group of collaborators in tow, Klett hit the road for a second time. The team included his students Kyle Bajakian, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron Wolfe. Writer William L. Fox tagged along taking notes. In 2004, the Museum of New Mexico Press published their project in the book, Third View: Second Sights.

“Most people assume that landscape photographs are about rocks or trees or space,” Klett explains. “But I believe their real meaning concerns our essential connection to place, to each other, and, most important, to time.”

Rephotography has allowed Klett to probe these themes with a depth and complexity that has grown over the course of his nearly 30-year career.

In many ways, Third View is his most ambitious project to date. Each entry starts with a historic image. In most cases, the original view is followed by two photographs of the same scene taken 20 years apart.

During the course of their fieldwork, Klett and his collaborators did more than just shoot two-dimensional photographs. They also conducted interviews, recorded sounds, and videotaped details in multiple locations. Often they gathered telling artifacts and later displayed them alongside the photographs in Third View exhibitions.

The project team mounted this collateral material on an interactive DVD that accompanies the printed book. With the click of a computer mouse, viewers can run a roving magnifying glass over the photographs to scan their fine-grained details. Animated walk-arounds take users on 360-degree virtual tours of freestanding rock towers. Taped interviews introduce residents from small western outposts along the Third View journey. Inventories of found objects provide resonant human traces.

Together, the multimedia documentation presents a more nuanced, sometimes haunting, view of the land and the people behind the lens.

Take Logan Springs, Nevada, for example, which lies some three hours north of Las Vegas. When O’Sullivan visited Logan Springs in 1871, the photographer found a tiny cluster of houses built at the base of a great sandstone outcrop.

Sites such as Logan Springs, however, give lie to the idea of the West as a place of fresh starts, as the promise of a new Eden where the cargo of wrecked lives can be sorted and disappointment redeemed.

Klett’s team toured the remote location in 1998. The original settlement had vanished. Just around the corner was a house built in more recent times. But it too had been abandoned.

Video footage of the structure’s interior reveals a fully furnished interior. It’s as if the occupants had hastily fled in the middle of the night. Cans of peas stand rusting on the kitchen counter. The opening of a cupboard door reveals shelves fully stocked with spices and cooking oils. A mattress strewn with clothing molders on the floor.

Most poignant of all is a discarded copy of a religious magazine entitled Family Home Evening. Ironically, it was dated 1971, exactly 100 years after O’Sullivan visited the spot.

The Third View team found a flimsy plastic record inside the magazine. Much to their surprise, it was still playable. Made in the Vietnam era of social upheaval, the record delivers a series of stern lectures for young people by elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Logan Springs illustrates an underlying theme in Klett’s rephotographic endeavors: “To visualize how the past, present, and future overlap at common points in space,” he writes.

For the ASU professor, this concern seems to have become more personal with each project. In 2005, for example, he and collaborator Byron Wolfe published a third collection of rephotographic works: Yosemite in Time. Included is a view taken from the shores of Lake Tenaya.

It was at Lake Tenaya that renowned artists such as Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams made photographic history. They stood within 20 feet of one another to capture the same view decades apart in time.

While Wolfe and Klett were setting up their own camera, an elderly man approached them. He asked if they would take his photo to commemorate the day. He told them that 42 years ago he and his new bride had celebrated their honeymoon camping on the beach. Now he had traveled back to the lake to spread the ashes of his beloved wife who had recently died after a prolonged struggle with cancer.

Klett has formal training as a geologist. He describes such encounters in geological terms. Places like Lake Tenaya, he says, contain a kind of stratigraphic record of human experience. Not only was it a site where photographic history had been made but it also was layered with the experience of countless other people.

“Pictures are very good at showing that,” he says. “They capture a moment in that space and then it’s gone. It means that this time, this space, this now is really important. You can’t come back.”

“On a personal note,” Klett writes, “perhaps the ultimate lesson in revisiting these sites has been in making me more aware of the present.”

See images and learn more about the work at: www.thirdview.org

For more information, contact Mark Klett, School of Art, Katherine K. Herberger College of Art, 480.965.5367. Send email to Mark.Klett@asu.edu