Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon

Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe

Image credit: Rock formations on the road to Lee’s Ferry, AZ, by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, 2008.

Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers the artists spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon. Their landscape photographs are based on the practice of rephotography, in which they identify sites of historic photographs and make new photographs of those precise locations. Klett and Wolfe referenced a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs and drawings by William Bell and William Henry Holmes, to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, and from souvenir postcards to contemporary digital images drawn from Flickr. The pair then employed digital postproduction methods to bring the original images into dialogue with their own. The result is this stunning volume (which also has contributions by Rebecca Senf and Stephen Pyne), illustrated with a wealth of full-color illustrations that attest to the role photographers—both anonymous and great—have played in picturing American places.

This lecture is open to the public. For more information, please visit www.infocus-phxart.org.