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

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.

San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books about art, landscape, public and collective life, ecology, politics, hope, meandering, reverie, and memory. They include Men Explain Things To Me, The Faraway Nearby; Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; Storming the Gates of Paradise; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, for which she received a Guggenheim fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award. She has worked on climate change, Native American land rights, and antinuclear, human rights, and antiwar issues as an activist and journalist. A contributing editor to Harper’s and a frequent contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com, Solnit has made her living as an independent writer since 1988.

Byron Wolfe is a widely exhibited photographer whose work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a recipient of the Santa Fe Prize for Photography and a Guggenheim fellowship. He teaches at California State University in Chico and lives in northern California.

Mark Klett has been photographing the western landscape for more than twenty years. His books include Third View, Second Sights; Desert Legends; Revealing Territory; and Black Rock Desert, with William Fox. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Buhl Foundation award. He is Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University.