Yosemite in Time

This book was recommended by my Tutor as inspiration for my work at Rye Harbour. It contains three essays by Rebecca Solnit that were very interesting and the first was particularly relevant.

“Change is the measure of time” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:ix) – is this wrong or just difficult to understand, since the book seems to negate this opening statement by suggesting that time is definitely not linear and in some situations can appear to go backwards. Certain landscape have become more “pristine” due to controls on building and fires – for example the native inhabitants used to use small controlled burns to create meadows which also acted as firebreaks whereas now there is more forest but also more chance of massive, catastrophic fires. There is also less building – we assume that the built environment is an unmistakeable destiny whereas ultimately it must be the other way round? Forever is a long time but the planet cannot sustain us until then. As discussed elsewhere perhaps another way of saying that in the difficulty of understanding is our whole problem with time and nature.

“Landscapes most crucial condition is considered to be space, but its deepest theme is time” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:18)

The authors rephotograph the landscape images made by several photographs, with perhaps most focus on Eadweard Muybridge who produced a series of Mammoth (20 X 24 inch) plates held at UC Berkeley Bancroft library and available online (see bibliography). A number of these are reproduced in the book, although it is online that the challenge of containing the dynamic range with the technology of the day, particularly the blue light of the skies, can be seen. Muybridge was an unconventional character whose approach differed somewhat to other photographers. For example many, even Ansel Adams, tended to photograph close to access roads or trails whereas Muybridge often took more challenging routes to his locations despite the extent of his equipment. To further add to the challenge of rephotography he tended to adjust his images “in post”, typically by adding cloud details to the burnt out skies. He also used local, Native American Indian names for places as plate titles.

The art and science of rephotography is of course discussed in some detail – for example it is not just the same place/angle/lens-camera combination that are reproduced but at the same time of day and year to mimic the light – so that the Earth is on the same tilt on its axis and in the same position relative to the sun. I was unsure what was done about bright sunny days vs cloudy rainy days – maybe this is less of an issue in California!?

This leads to the observation that “the question of how long it takes to make a photograph has nothing to do with how long the film was exposed” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:15) since the amount of research and preparation for an image is considerable. Extending this, Solnit raises the question of seeing vs looking – exposure time to the issue, if you like. Considering his wrt the work of Adams, whose “view” of the Yosemite is perhaps the dominant one, the viewer looks through Adams’ eyes, sees according to his viewpoint. It is of course possible to take time and a different viewpoint to see things differently. But in the end, whilst Muybridge took several of the same views before Adams, Adams’ viewpoint has “won”, at least for now. Photographs taken at the viewpoints in Yosemite become acts of offering, rarely looked at after the act has been performed. Klett refers to the “Power of Site” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:106).

Solnit compares the situation of the Victorians in 1872 at the time Muybridge was working. Evolution had been recently discovered but God was still pre-eminent, man was small in the great wilderness landscape – the sublime that Muybridge perhaps captured on his mammoth plates. Nevertheless many Victorians tried to support the notion of God with beauty and light in the landscape, a view perhaps supported more by the later work of Adams, despite the move towards the notion of a “God of the Gaps”, whose role shrank with increasing scientific discovery. Of course now in the Anthropocene era it is “man” as supreme being that controls destiny, at least in the short term as far as nature’s clock is concerned. Ultimately of course, as discussed above, this does not sustain forever. Sustainability is a key concern for 21stC humans – a move towards immortality?

Solnit points out that Native Americans used to manage the Yosemite landscape, for example setting controlled burns to create meadow openings that also act as firebreaks against more catastrophic conflagrations. Modern Americans have used first the notion of “God’s Own Country” and then social Darwinism to justify the eradication of the Native American Indian. The wilderness act implies that any interaction between humans and nature is destructive, but this could be a dangerous place to start since it rules out learning to live in nature? Several of the rephotographs of views that included meadows now reveal little but overgrown thickets.

The team has worked on not just “second views” of places but returned to repeated the process again; Byron Wolfe makes the point that “A third view implies the possibility of a fourth, a fifth, of understanding change as continuing beyond our own time” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:xi).

The issue of time becomes even more interesting, however, when not considered as views through time but how images can be combined on a page to convey time: “Mark had … been fascinated by how such multiple-image artworks can represent time” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:xii). Space is pieced together in a nonperspectival way (e.g. Hockney’s joiners) where the components of the space come from different times. In this way a different dimension is (literally) introduced into the picture. If photography is ultimately about time, then it is important to understand how a still image can represent time … A simple example of this uses a tried and tested approach that was in fact a necessity for long exposures in 1872, which blurred the water to an opaque white and led to one of the project names Ghost River.

This in turn leads to a discussion on the old adage about never standing in the same river twice. This refers to the water having moved on, under the bridge if you like, but for rephotography this becomes more complicated – “To be in the same place and to be in a place where things look more or less the same are not the same thing” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:12). The Merced river shifted by 100m in one of the images.  I note that the River Rother at Rye shifted very considerably after the great storms of the 14thC…

Klett discusses 3 models of time that work well for photography: the circle, the river, and stacked planes. Note that dendrochronology is also a model based on rings, the present encompassing the past. Solnit discusses a model after Barbour/Borges of time as an infinite garden of forking paths, which are also like photographic moments (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:17). I can think of Rye Harbour as a map of paths which meet at moments in time symbolised by iconic structures – Castle, Martello Tower, Old Lifeboat Station, Pill Box, Red Hut.

Buddhist philosophy quoted by the Reverend Mas Kodami: “One does not stand still looking for a path.  One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:22).

Furthermore Solnit describes Yosemite as a “precession of simulacra” (after Baudrillard). The park seems to exist as a series of landscapes, as photographs. Rephotography and indeed the park itself as a post-modernist exercise, since the park is now engineered to look like it did in old photographs.  Yosemite is almost constructed from photographs.

The point is that Yosemite (and almost every other place touched by humans) is a managed landscape. Thoreau stated that “in wildness is the preservation of the world” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:63) but wilderness is a negotiated concept that remains as it does by anthropocenic consent. “We’re seeing the formation of a new relationship between culture and nature, one less adversarial in focus, one defined by the human need for close connection to place, one that honours iconography…” (Klett, Solnit & Wolfe, 2005:107).

However global consent is harder to obtain. While locally Yosemite is protected, rising temperatures means the glaciers on the higher peaks may soon be a thing of the past. When John Muir first wrote about them, their existence was denied by the scientific powers. Global warming may ultimately perform a temporal shift of perspective and prove the naysayers Agassiz and King right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Klett, Solnit & Wolfe. (2005) Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers. Texas: Trinity University Press
2. Kingston University Library Eadweard Muybridge Collection At: https://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/ (Accessed 26.5.2022)
3. Muybridge, E. (1872) Finding Aid to Valley of the Yosemite, Sierra Nevada Mountains, and Mariposa Grove of Mammoth Trees. UC Berkeley Bancroft Library At: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf2779p2bj;developer=local;style=oac4;doc.view=items (Accessed 26.5.2022)