Droll Things

Third View revisits the sites of historic western American landscape photographs. The project makes new photographs, keeps a field diary of its travels, and collects materials useful in interpreting the scenes, change and the passage of time.

Most sites are represented in a series of three views taken at different times. The original photographs were taken by photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, John K. Hillers, and William Bell. The photographs were made for the western geological and geographical surveys of the 1860’s and ‘70’s. These surveys were lead by Ferdinand V. Hayden, Clarence King, Lt. George Wheeler, and Major John Wesley Powell. The survey photographs were typically the earliest to be made in the American West, and form the baseline of an important visual record. The pictures are benchmarks for monitoring physical changes in the land as well as providing access into the earliest ways land and culture were represented by photography.

The second views, from which our third views were based, were made during the late 1970’s for the Rephotographic Survey Project (please see the book Second View: the Rephotographic Survey Project, Klett, Manchester, and Verburg, the University of New Mexico Press, 1984).

Third View was created specifically to investigate changes that have occurred since the landscape sites were last photographed, a time period ranging from twenty to one hundred and thirty years. In most cases there are three photographs at each site, but Third View includes over a dozen sites that had not been rephotographed previously and in those cases there are only two views presennted.

Pictures after jump.
Link & Image: thirdview

First View
Timothy O’Sullivan, 1867. Pyramid Lake, Nev., Pyramid Island and tufa knobs, Thinolite. (United States Geological Survey.)

Second View
Mark Klett for the Rephotographic Survey Project, 1979. Tufa knobs, Pyramid Lake, Nev.

Third View
Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe for the Third View Project, 2000. Tufa knobs, Pyramid Lake, Nev.

The project’s original field team included photographers Mark Klett (Project Director and
Chief Photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project), Kyle Bajakian, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron Wolfe. Writer William L. Fox and photographer Michael Marshall later joined this group in its second and third season respectively. The project combined our interests in fine art photography, history, literature, the natural and social sciences, new digital technologies, design, and interactive media.

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