Ep. 33: Time and Time Again: The Fascinating Evidence from Western Repeat Photography

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Speaker 1: Repeat photography done one hundred years apart, is giving us a sense of a West that once looked and functioned very differently than the modern landscapes we now live in or visit. I’m Dan Flores, and this is the American West, time and time again, the fascinating evidence from Western repeat photography. In episode thirteen of this podcast, I said a few things about the West’s great nineteenth century landscape photographers. For almost four decades, from the eighteen sixties through the eighteen nineties, photographers like Edward Mybridge, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and their assistants lugged hundreds of pounds of equipment, heavy eight x ten wet plate cameras, tripods, fragile glass negatives, entire portable dark rooms. In my Bridge’s case, ropes and pulleys to lower himself down precipitous canyon walls to photograph the West. They composed shots in their viewfinders, inserted dripping glass plates to capture a negative, then removed len’s covers and counted down exposures. They did this from Colorado to California, Arizona to Idaho in search of what they called the best general views. Some of them, like Jackson, were working for the railroads, which periodically employed photographers to convey the settlement possible of the West to easterners. But O’Sullivan, and for much of his career Jackson two, was photographing the best scenery in the West as a government employee of the brand new United States Geological Survey.

00:02:16
Speaker 2: It’s so called Great Surveys.

00:02:19
Speaker 1: Post Civil War explorations into intriguing parts of the West, led by twenty and thirty somethings John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, Ferdinand Hayden, and George Wheeler mapp rivers examined mineral possibilities and puzzled out the geological story of the West. The Survey leaders took along painters to portray the West, among whom the most famous became Thomas Moran. This is why there is today a Moran Point on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, another Moran point in Yosemite, and an artist point in the Canyon of the Yellowstone that most assumed was named for Moran, although Moran actually painted his famous Oil of the Lower Falls from a spot across the gorge. But the Great Survey leaders knew well that most landscape painters endeavored to convey how a landscape made a viewer feel, rather than produce a precise rendering of geology and form. To capture what the West truly looked like, they needed, above all, to employ the masters of the new technological Marvel called the camera a device as brand new, shocking, and in the eighteen sixties and seventies, as full of wild possibility as ai is now. The Great Survey photographs by Jackson and O’Sullivan, along with landscape images by lesser known photographers that work in the West one hundred years or more ago, were earth.

00:04:01
Speaker 2: Shattering in their time.

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Speaker 1: They provided a kind of first view, or at least a first entirely believable view, of the West, for the American public. Since then, these one hundred and fifty year old images have become just as critical to understanding the West we now know as they were for people in the eighteen seventies, but for a very different reason. That reason is a fine one for thinking about a great many aspects of Western nature. For starters, a landscape photograph from the dawn of photography offers those of us in its future a baseline against which to measure change. Now imagine the possibilityies of pairing a baseline image from the eighteen sixties or even the early nineteen hundreds alongside a modern image of the very same scene taken in our time. What might a comparison tell you about geological time, about ecological processes, about the advance or retreat of civilization and technology, perhaps even about climate change. How might a comparison between two photos of the same scene shot one hundred years apart help resolve some pressing modern question, or, at its simplest, give us a sense of how a landscape looked then as opposed to how it looks now, and if there are differences, pondering why that might be the case. In nineteen eighty four, the National Endowment for the Arts and the US Geological Survey produced a seminal book that took on at least part of this fascinating thought bubble, the task of setting baseline and modern photographs of the same places side by side. As the introduction of second view, the Rephotographic Survey Project told its readers. Between nineteen seventy seven and nineteen seventy nine, this project sent out several modern professional photographers into the West to reshoot one hundred and twenty of the scenes captured by the nineteenth century Great Survey photographers. Relying on the topographic details and the scale in the original photographs, and on knowledge of the fixed millimeters zoom size of the lenses on nineteenth century eight by ten cameras so those could be replicated, the modern day team plotted out a technique using geometic lines to help position today’s cameras in exactly the spot where William Henry Jackson or Timothy O’Sullivan had placed their cameras a century before. The next task was to ascertain the moment in time the shot had been exposed in the original photographs, the month of the year, the day of the month, the time of day. That information came from journals and notes Jackson and O’Sullivan kept, along with clues from shadow angles and such in the photographs themselves. The purpose of a scientific methodology like this was to allow history in the West to speak with the least amount of interruption or gastad interpretation. So what does a Western landscape when you engage in repeat photographs as carefully modulated as these, but shot at the far ends of a couple of human lifetimes? We all know that time marches on relentlessly, and if you have a passing familiarity with history, you understand that its greatest lesson is that everything is always changing, albeit at varying rates of speed, and that the endless test of historical change is not just to observe it, but to try to figure out the why of it. If the landscapes and ecology of the West possessed an unexpected similarity of appearance one hundred and fifty years ago after lodging a surprise Wow, the natural question is, and why was that? And if there’s yet a very different look to the Western landscape today. But again, with our recognizable says, we ought to be able to say that these visible changes have causes we can figure out. Because of its broad coverage of Western places in almost every state, the Insights of Second View is a logical starting point for understanding what repeat photography in the West can tell us. But it’s not the only reference point I want to use here. Another is a more recent volume called Yellowstone and the Biology of Time, published in nineteen ninety nine. A third valuable work of Western repeat photography I’ll draw on is a book titled The Colorado front Range A Century of Ecological Change, published in nineteen ninety one. The most recent is an online repeat photography project by the US Geological Survey and the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center on the gla of Glacier National Park, Montana, a project completed in twenty nineteen. Before proceeding to the insights of Western repeat photography, we should marvel just a little bit over those baseline photographs and the artists who captured them. By the time of the Great Surveys, the stunning new technology of photography had made tremendous strides.

00:10:31
Speaker 2: The big breakthrough was.

00:10:33
Speaker 1: The eighteen fifty one invention of the Kelodean wet plate process, using silver nitrate as a light sensitive medium, capturing an image sensitive to varying light.

00:10:49
Speaker 2: During the years of.

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Speaker 1: The earlier the gariotype photos had been accomplished with the use of mercury and its attendant often fatal effects, so silver nitrate was a big step forward. Silver nitrate glass negatives yielded sharp and reproducible prints and fixed their exposures remarkably quickly for the time, a well lit scene, usually requiring only five seconds for a successful exposure. But let’s face it compared to your phone camera or a digital SLR. Photography using eight x ten glass plate negatives was a nightmare, especially in a place like the Rocky Mountains or the Yosemite canyons. The cameras were huge, weighing an average of sixty pounds, plus another thirty pounds for the absolutely essential tripod to hold it steady.

00:11:47
Speaker 2: The gear so heavy it had to.

00:11:49
Speaker 1: Be transported almost to the scene of any shoot in a wagon or on the back.

00:11:54
Speaker 2: Of a mule.

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Speaker 1: To shoot a single photo with equipment like this, you first had to get the tripod mounted camera in position to compose in its viewfinder the scene that had caught your eye. Then, back at your wagon, you coated a fragile glass plate the size of a sheet of typing paper with kelodium potassium and dipped it in a bath of silver nitrate. That meant you were ready to cover the dripping glass plate to its edges with a black cloth so you could carry it to the camera and load it without stray light ruining the negative. Once it was in place, you removed the lens cover and counted down the exposure guessed at from experience. Then you replaced the lens cover pulled out the glass plate, covered it again, and hauled it back to your wagon dark room.

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Speaker 2: There you developed it in an.

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Speaker 1: Acid bath, sealed the image with a fixer, and washed and dried the plate, all in one seamless motion. In the amount of time it took a Timothy O’Sullivan to take one landscape photograph, today you could fire off a few hundred exposures with a phone you’ve carried to a mountaintop in your shirt pocket, with no clumsy tripod to weigh you down, our dark room chemicals to eat away the skin on your fingers. But to their credit and our gratitude, they did it. My bridge, O’Sullivan Jackson, along with Jack Hillers, Carlton Watkins, Alexander Gardner, A. J. Russell, and a host of others less famous, roamed the West independently or with the great surveys, seeking out the best scenery. In terms of the scenes they looked for and the compositions they framed in their viewfinders. Almost all of them were strongly influenced by the landscape painters of the Romantic Age. Their photographs often looked today as if they imagined the landscape they saw hanging in gilded frames in the ante room of some Gilded Age captain of industry. Yet their photographs took over what had once been a function of art, a record of factual landscape information.

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Speaker 2: At a level of detail few painters ever attempted.

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Speaker 1: What made the landscape photo such a marvel was that it was, by a factor of magnitude, a more precise visual rendering of place in a moment of time than had ever been possible in human history until then. Here was the West as it truly was. Because many of you will be listening to this rather than seeing the paired photographs on YouTube or Apple TV only to provide some visual description, so it’s possible to imagine the changes in the West that repeat photography demonstrates so well. The least surprising result of pairing photographs of the same scene shot a century apart in the West, or indeed almost anywhere else in America, is a record showing the growth of the human built environment. In the book Second View, modern photographers Gordon Beauchamp and Mark Klett commence with double paired recent photos of a scene Timothy O’Sullivan’s shot in eighteen sixty nine of the Wasatch Mountains and the few score scattered houses that then made up Salt Lake City. O’Sullivan had set up his camera in the foothills of the Ochre Mountains to the west of the city, and the white rectangles of the houses appeared tiny and overwhelmed by a vast natural setting. By contrast, Gordon Bouchaw’s nineteen seventy eight photo of the exact scene shows a modern urban setting, dense with planted trees and framing Mormon Temple Square, occupying a full third of the landscape in view. Interestingly, even the foreground vegetation has now changed from bunch grasses in eighteen sixty nine to what appears to be exotic cheap grass in nineteen seventy eight. In Mark Klett’s nineteen ninety seven photo of this same scene, the city is partly obscured by a mine tailings pile, and mining hardware now occupies the foreground as the open pit of the Bingham Canyon mine has spread into the scene. There are plenty of these kind of expected changes across a century in the books on Western repeat photography. In another second view pairing the original is once again a Timothy O’Sullivan photograph, this one taken in eighteen seventy two of the Horseshoe Bend of the Green River in present Utah. The exposure from a high overlook called Flaming Gorge Ridge.

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Speaker 2: O’Sullivan’s photo is a romantic age view of a sublime Western wilderness.

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Speaker 1: The ue of the river frames both sides of a half grapefruit mountain in the upper middle. From where the photographer stands, the country plunges dramatically from his feet down to juniper speckled hills, with the intriguing Flaming Gorge angling through the middle of the view far below. In Mark Klett’s nineteen seventy eight photo from the exact spot where O’Sullivan stood one hundred and six years earlier, two thirds of the same scene is now fit with the unruffled waters of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir.

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Speaker 2: Most of the half Grapefruit mountain in.

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Speaker 1: The distance still stands above the waterline, but all the wild lands below, including the Horseshoe Bend of the Green and the Gorge that gave the place its name, now lie underwater. So yes, change as expected, But the West isn’t so easy to predict. It’s been a region of mad cap resource extraction that often has no chance of lasting an entire century. Among the stunning pairings in second view are photos taken by O’Sullivan of the wholesale transformation of the Nevada Desert by mining development in eighteen sixties Virginia City.

00:19:02
Speaker 2: When you see O’Sullivan’s photo.

00:19:05
Speaker 1: Of the elaborate buildings and smokestacks of a quartz mill set among barren hills in eighteen sixty eight, you immediately assume that the paired photo of the same setting, with a stream bed and junipers on the hills but no sign of mining activity at all, must be the prior shot how the desert looked before Virginia City. Except it’s not. The second view here is Mark Klatt’s photo of a nineteen seventy nine Nevada desert where not even a trace of the quartz mill remains and the wild has returned. Repeat photographs like these make an optimistic point. With some reclamation correction, even previously despoiled places in a region as arid as the West can recover their health and time. In the Southwest, particularly in Arizona and southern Colorado, pared photographs taking a century or more apart also tell us a little something about geologic time, assuming that photographic documentars among us will still be doing repeat photography a few centuries down the line from now. Parent photos then are likely to be more informative about geologic change, since this at least usually is landscape progression that happens much more slowly than human built environments or ecological change. William Henry Jackson’s eighteen seventy three photographs of rock hoodoos in southern Colorado, matched with Joe Ann Weberg’s nineteen seventy seven shots of the same formation, shows that sandstone pedestals can be the geologic decorations of a moment, with once present hoodoos now missing or broken off halfway up, with the passage of only a century. On the other hand, the vertical slick rock walls of Mark Klett’s Canyon de Che don’t look at all different in nineteen seventy eight than when O’Sullivan first photographed them in eighteen seventy three. Only the vegetation growth along the canyon bottom’s intermittent stream has changed, which is a way of introducing one of the most dramatic and at first glanced, puzzling differences in the look of the Old West and the New One.

00:21:46
Speaker 2: As revealed by repeat photography.

00:21:48
Speaker 1: The natural sciences have convincingly shown us by now that there really is no such thing as a climax condition when it comes to nature trees, and vegetation in particular, the natural world is a constantly moving target. It does not require a great deal of climatic variation to vary plant growth from grasslands to forests, or to turn grasslands into desert. The ecologies that exist in any particular place at any particular moment in time depend on a host of other factors too, Beyond climate. Two truly significant ones for the American West a century or more ago were the presence or absence of particular species of wildlife and the degree to which the ancient human inhabitants were managing their world and influencing.

00:22:43
Speaker 2: Ecological processes.

00:22:51
Speaker 1: To see one of the most unanticipated changes in the Western landscape. Two of the other photographic studies I mentioned earlier, Yellowstone and the Biology of Time and the Colorado Front Range a Century of Ecological Change, offer up some of our most revealing repeat photography matches. The mountainous Front Range of the Colorado Rockies is an outstanding place to start. Let’s begin with a nineteen twenty one photograph of rams Head Mountain shot by W. T. Lee, matched up with a nineteen eighty six photo taken in the exact spot by T. T.

00:23:32
Speaker 2: Veblin and D. C. Lorenz True.

00:23:36
Speaker 1: Across the sixty five years between these two photographs, the small lake at the foot of the mountain has become a much larger reservoir and anticipated change. But it’s the tremendous difference in the coverage of Ponderosa pine trees, both on the foreground hills and on the main mountain.

00:23:58
Speaker 2: That requires a take. Here.

00:24:02
Speaker 1: In just six decades, the number of Ponderosa pines.

00:24:06
Speaker 2: Has easily quadrupled.

00:24:09
Speaker 1: That same change from a far more open west as far back as photographs exist, to a significantly more densely forest one in our time exists to marvel over everywhere repeat photography has been done in the region. Compare William Henry Jackson’s eighteen seventy two photograph of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone with Kletts and bouchaws nineteen seventy eight photo of that scene where tree growth nearly obscures the view, and this ecological change is evident in Yellowstone two. It’s everywhere apparent in Colorado. An eighteen ninety nine photo of the Red Hill Valley northwest of Boulder shows a beautifully grass valley swale with the mere sprinkling of pines on the slopes. The matching nineteen eighty four photo y Veblin and Lorentz shows a dirt road and houses and a landscape where the number of pine trees has easily increased by a factor of magnitude. Same thing with left hand canyon on the front range. An unknown photographer shot a scene of this mountain drainage in nineteen hundred that shows a landscape that’s roughly sixty percent grassland forty percent scattered pines with unforested peaks. In the Veblin Lorentz match from nineteen eighty four, grassland.

00:25:42
Speaker 2: Is all but invisible.

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Speaker 1: Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs have increased by several times over and now blanket the formerly open mountaintops. A forest takeover ecologist believe commenced sometime in the eighteen ninety Since this is the story almost everywhere in the West and in several different ecological zones, including lower elevation pinion juniper country and even planes grasslands increasingly invaded by junipers and mesquites. This is a significant change that obviously begs explanation, and the why questions have to be directed time wise in both directions. First, why do our oldest photographs show a West that looked the way it did? Why was the West from nineteen hundred and on earlier in time so much more open, with much more grassland and far fewer trees. The ready answer, of course is fire. As a mostly arid and windy region characterized by summer thunderstorms that readily produced lightning strike ignitions, most of the West burned easily, and did so repeatedly and regularly.

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Speaker 2: Its ecologies, in fact.

00:27:13
Speaker 1: Had long been fire adapted, accounting for the many stories by early observers of open forests with little underbrush or young saplings, but instead towering colonnades of old growth ponderosas so limbed up by ground fires that they had almost become fire resistant. Photos of open landscapes are also evidence, many ecologists are now arguing for a very long history of native fire ecology in the West. Indian people burned their landscapes to affect beneficial outcomes for them. Fires opened up the country for seeing and for travel. Fires beat back the spread of shrubs like saul as brush, whose oils make it highly susceptible to death by flames, clearing the country for grasses that elk and horses preferred. Fires promoted berry patches and opened the ground to be able to spot snakes. Because grazers like bison or elk preferred the green grasses that sprouted in the wake of autumn burns, fires created predictable destinations for drawing in huntable wildlife as winters wound down. In fact, we still call the calm often smoked hazy days in the autumn Indian summer, because this was the season when native people tended to burn the most. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the man who knew more about the West than anyone else was John Wesley Powell. Powell wrote that the recurring threat to the mountain forests of the West was fire, and in his opinion, the best way to redress that threat was to remove Indians to reservations where their agents could prevent them from firing the western landscape during dry seasons, while removing Native people from their ancient ecological management of the West would have been an important reason why the West took on a new look after nineteen hundred. There were other contributors to that sea change, usually through carelessness rather than intent. Western settlers also contributed to widespread burns. One of the most devastating wildfires ever recorded in the West, a conflagration known as the Big Blow Up, swept out of Washington State across Idaho and Montana in the summer of nineteen ten. It lit up more than three million acres, inflicting wholesale destruction on entire towns, and killed eighty seven people in its aftermath. The new US Forest Service adopted a very aggressive fire suppression policy that influenced forest policy and the look of the West for the next century. So now absent the fires that for centuries had kept Western landscapes grassier and more open, with forests of scattered old growth, fire suppression began to produce a version of the West that appears in the most recent of the matched repeat photographs. A thick aggregation of spreading shrubs plus seas of sprouting saplings, once taken out by low intensity fires, now spread across plains, foothills, and mountains ironically creating the conditions for the destructive crown fires of our own time. Meanwhile, a new abundance of Douglas fir needles has built up spruce budworm numbers until they too have begun ravaging mountain forests in the foothills. Denser pinion pine forests similarly became targets of an epidemic of pine bark beetles that killed forty five million trees in the Southwest in the first.

00:31:21
Speaker 2: Years of this century.

00:31:23
Speaker 1: Stories like these are the accompaniment to second view photographs of a far greener West that replaced what O’Sullivan and Jackson once saw. The photo book Yellowstone and the Biology of Time offers us yet another and actually very different take on the changed ecology of the West in the past one hundred and fifty years. This change points towards a set of unintended ecological consequences from apparently changed wildlife dynamics in the West. When he was on the Yellowstone Plateau in eighteen seventy one, William Henry Jackson took a photo of the Soda Butte floodplane wending through the future National Park, both in the foreground and farther along the stream beneath the Butte. Native willows appear flourishing along the edges of the stream bed. One hundred and nineteen years later, in nineteen ninety, photographer D. B. Houston took a repeat photograph of the same scene. There is not a single willow of any size anywhere along the Soda Butte floodplane in his nineteen ninety photo. That matched set of photographs takes us into the heart of controversy.

00:33:01
Speaker 2: The year Houston took.

00:33:03
Speaker 1: His photo was five years prior to the reintroduction of gray wolves into Yellowstone under the recovery mandate of the Endangered Species Act. Wolves have been gone from the park since nineteen twenty six, deliberately removed as part of America’s war on predators.

00:33:23
Speaker 2: In their absence, by.

00:33:25
Speaker 1: The nineteen nineties, an estimated twenty five to thirty one thousand elk were summering in the park. Judging from photographic and other evidence. Across that same time span, roughly nineteen thirty to nineteen ninety, at least fifty percent of all the willows and young aspen stands in Yellowstone disappeared. The relationship between the sixty year absence of a top of the food chain predator. Like the gray wolf and burgeoning elk urgeon Yellowstone is by now a generally accepted ecological cause and effect, so is the elk’s attraction to the young shoots of deciduous.

00:34:13
Speaker 2: Willows and aspens. In a later episode, I’ll take up.

00:34:17
Speaker 1: The popularization of a controversial conclusion that the return of gray wolves to Yellowstone has since set off a chain reaction marked by aspen, willow and other ecological recoveries.

00:34:31
Speaker 2: But for this part of the story.

00:34:32
Speaker 1: The differences in the paired photos of the soda butte draintings between eighteen seventy one and nineteen ninety would seem to have a straightforward explanation, Although there certainly may have been other contributing circumstances. Wolves and elk are likely players in a different looking West across that span of time. And now let’s proceed to yet one additional repeat photography project that also seems to go to the very heart of a political battle about a changed and changing West in nineteen ninety seven, sensitive to an increasingly fluctuating Western climate and to arguments by climatologists that carbon released in the Earth’s atmosphere by the two centuries of burning fossil fuels was instrumental in those wild fluctuations. The US Geological Survey and the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center hatched the idea of doing a repeat photography project on the glaciers of Glacier National Park, Montana, established in nineteen ten at the urging of conservation is like George Byrd Grennell and University of Montana biologist Morton J. Elrod, Glacier National Park, high against the border of Alberta, Canada, was a wonderland of peaks, snowfields, and glaciers. When Glacier joined America’s crown jewel Western Parks, there were eighty named glaciers within its boundaries. Finally completed in twenty nineteen, the Glacier Repeat Photography Project assembled the same kind of scientific pairing of photos originally laid out in the USGS’s Second View. In Glacier Parks case, the baseline photos were more recent, shot from eighteen eighty seven to nineteen forty three, while selected photographers shot the paired modern photos from nineteen ninety seven to twenty nineteen. As with Second View, extreme care went into shooting in precisely the same location as historic photos, as well as at the same time of day and same time of the year. The most famous glacier in the park has always been Grenell Glacier, one of the true ice giants of the Northern Rockies. When Grenell Glacier was photographed in nineteen ten by Morton Elrod, its thick glacial ice blanketed two thirds of l Rod’s photo, from the garden wall ridge on the right side of the photo all the way across to the scene’s left edge. An immense glacier lapped at the foot of Mount Gould in nineteen ten, only the mountain’s vertical walls stood clear of ice. In twenty sixteen, photographer L McKeon of the USGS repeated l Rod’s shot from one hundred and six years earlier.

00:38:00
Speaker 2: The change is jaw dropping.

00:38:04
Speaker 1: By twenty sixteen, Grenell Glacier took up no more than twenty percent of a scene it once entirely dominated. Where the bulk of the eyes had once rested had now become a glacial cirque lake at the foot.

00:38:20
Speaker 2: Of Mount Gould.

00:38:21
Speaker 1: The staggering shrinkage of this famous park glacier in a bit more than a century had in fact now split Grenelle into two ice remnants, a former piece of Grenell now hanging onto Garden Wall Ridge, and the right of the scene is today called Salamander Glacier. The National Park’s Boulder Glacier was also photographed by el Rod in nineteen ten, at which time it dreat cape like across thirty percent of el Rod’s composition of the park’s Livingston Range. When USGS photographers located l Rod’s perch and repeated his shot in two thousand and seven, Boulder Glacier essentially no longer existed. What had once been an impressive glacier scores of feet thick and stretching across a quarter mile of mountain had fractured into a few minor snowfields below Boulder Peak, with snow and ice now occupying less than five percent of the scene. By twenty nineteen, glaciers in the park had been melting so rapidly that only twenty six of them now still merit official glacier designation. The causes of the remarkable disappearing glaciers of the West Glacier National Park are of course invisible impaired repeat photographs, and the same is true of this kind of evidence general. Repeat photographs that show us glaciers or none, or forests where there were once grasslands merely tell us that the West we now live in or visit is a very different world than the West that occupied this same space on the ground one hundred or one hundred and fifty years ago. In that respect, repeat photography is pretty much like historical evidence of all kinds. History teaches us the lesson that the world is now different than it was, and that it’s still changing as we look.

00:40:36
Speaker 2: It’s up to our science and our.

00:40:39
Speaker 1: Analytical primate brains to explain and grapple with the reasons why.

00:41:02
Speaker 2: So.

00:41:02
Speaker 3: Dan, in this episode, you talk about the practice of repeat photography.

00:41:09
Speaker 2: And.

00:41:12
Speaker 3: Whenever that whenever this subject comes up, it like lights up something in my brain because I immediately think back to other books I’ve looked at, or at a historical site, they’ll have two photographs or even just one that you can compare to the landscape that you’re looking at. Yeah, and it’s something that’s very accessible for the general public to think about historical change, even like kids can pick it up. You know, you’re looking at two different images, But I wonder if you can just sort of speak to why this is such a compelling exercise in looking at two of the same viewpoints from different errors in time.

00:41:55
Speaker 1: Well, as you suggest, Randall, it’s in a way, it’s as if two photographs side by side is the quickest and easiest way to see change. You know what, in studying history, we’re always fascinated with the momentum of change over time and photographs somehow, because I mean, for one thing, we always assume a photograph cannot lie, is telling the truth. Of course, photographers realize very well that you manipulate photographs in all kinds of ways to make them say what you want. But on the other hand, I think that simple ability to visualize two different versions of the same the same look, the same thing that you’re you’re gazing at, is a pretty powerful way of getting it at evidence of change. And you know, we one of the great things about repeat photography is that, I mean, we have not had the ability to do anything like this except for one hundred and fifty or so years. I mean, photography only dates back to the eighteen forties, and you don’t really get images that are good enough to do something like repeat photography comparisons until this period. That I talk about in the episode where in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies, these photographers who are getting hired by the Great Surveys to go out and explore the West and photograph all the best scenes. They’re taking cameras that are capable of reproducing photographs that are good enough for us to actually see what the West really look like. It’s a powerful thing.

00:43:44
Speaker 2: I mean I.

00:43:46
Speaker 1: Do, and I think you know they’re probably I’m certainly not the only person out there who does this, but I do repeat photography myself on my own pieces of ground, or on particular landscapes that I’ve been fascinated with for a long time. I’ll pick out a spot at a time of year where I’ll shoot a photograph of this particular setting, and I go back year after year and do it. And of course, when you’re doing it over a span of just a few years, you don’t see change like you do. And these spans from the eighteen seventies to the nineteen nineties or something, right.

00:44:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was actually my next question was have you dabbled in this? And I’ve given your background in photography, I was guessing that you had, Oh yeah, one of the I guess as I was reading this and just thinking about the subject of repeat photography. Initially, maybe it’s just because we’re in the West and this is a very powerful and repetitive refrain. But initially I was just thinking, well, obviously repeat photography shows decline, right like landscapes get developed, vegetation disappears. But I think in this chapter you use a lot of sort of counterpoint examples to demonstrate that change is much more.

00:45:15
Speaker 2: Maybe fluid.

00:45:17
Speaker 3: You use the example of Salt Lake building up and at the same time a mine, a mining town disappearing, and so there’s not always the change that you expect in these photographs.

00:45:27
Speaker 1: Now there’s not, and that’s one of the fascinating things to me about them. I mean, you’re right, what we always expect is that, Okay, over time, everything is getting more built up. There are more people, there are more roads, more cities are going to spread. And that sequence of photographs of Salt Lake from the eighteen seventies through the nineteen nineties is very much that each one. I mean though the last two photographs are only about twelve years apart, and yet the Bingham Canyon mine has intruded on the scene. Just in that short space of time, and that’s what we expect. But I was really kind of struck by and charmed by the fact that we have repeat photographs of Virginia City, Nevada and the quartz mill site there back in the eighteen seventies that you look at it today. And I can recall very vividly the first time I flipped open the pages of Second View that USGS sponsored repeat photography project and saw these two images side by side. My mind told me the one that looks like a completely natural scene with no evidence of human manipulation in it is the original one. And it turned out, in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s the one that has been reclaimed and restored. And as I said, that’s kind of cause for optimism in a way, because in some of these landscapes that you see today, where there are mind tailings, piles and all sorts of disturbance, it looks as if there actually is a possibility to return and rewild the landscape to something that it originally looked like.

00:47:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that’s I think when people use the expression you can see history on the landscape, it often refers to human presence on the landscape.

00:47:26
Speaker 2: But in.

00:47:27
Speaker 3: Some instances, in a lot of instances, history on the landscape might be legible in the absence of development, right, Like I was thinking about wilderness area, I was thinking my thinking jumped around a lot. I was reading this, but I was thinking about how when you look at these photographs you can see change or continuity, but there’s no underlying explanatory framework, right, so it sort of keys you to historical change but doesn’t actually explain any of it. And I was thinking about some of the things that, like, you won’t see values changing in these photographs, but in some ways you can, because if you look at like a wilderness area or some you know, a mill site that’s been converted into a park outside of Missoula, you are seeing those values. You have to have the context to know that that’s what’s happening. But it’s like a very powerful demonstration or evidence of historical change without that underlying human framework.

00:48:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, without the analysis or the explanation, And which is sort of where I took the script. At the very end, I wanted people who listened to this and who particularly who saw these images to realize that they don’t come with an explanation. What you’re seeing is the raw evidence of change, but it requires another step or a or more than likely another sequence of steps to disentangle what has actually happened here. Why you’re seeing a West that looks like this in the eighteen seventies or eighteen eighties, and one one hundred years later that looks a completely different way. And the one that I think sort of caught me the most by surprise when I first started looking at repeat photography was the evidence of a much more open, less forested West in the nineteenth century than today. And I think the reason was because I probably came at those parrot images initially with the notion that, Okay, in our own time, we’re obviously we’re building a lot of housing where cutting down trees for all sorts of reasons. Surely there are far fewer trees now than there once were. The West must have had initially really dance beautiful force, and what you see in those images is the exact opposite of that. And again, without any explanation, you have to start taking that next step in your mind and figuring out with some kind of thought bubble. Okay, so here’s why that must be that way, and it it what.

00:50:23
Speaker 3: I thought of when I read that was the it’s sort of the opposite of what you would intuit. Similar types of photographs would show east of the Mississippi, because the most obvious answer is what happens when people when when European your American people get to a place, is oh, deforestation happens, right, But then you think back and there are also these descriptions of these big eastern grasslands, and it, I mean, this is just sort of a sprawling thought, but it brings you back to these early European accounts of American contact, and you just get a glimpse or a snapshot through written description of what the landscape looked like then, and then you get another one one hundred years later, and you have to sort of piece together how you reconcile the two.

00:51:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s harder to do with written descriptions because you know, you, for one thing, repeat photography as it’s being done scientifically by the United States Geological Survey, for example, they have a kind of a scientific methodology where what you do is you not only go back on the day, the same day of the year, same day of the month, same time of day, and try to reshoot the shot. They actually worked out in second view of a kind of a geometric mechanism for putting the camera lens in exactly the same place. With written descriptions, I mean, you’re a long way from that kind of precision. Somebody maybe describing what a scene looks like that’s fifteen miles away another time of year, and so it doesn’t doesn’t carry with it that kind of precision that doing something like repeat photography in this scientific way does, right.

00:52:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was thinking about the you know, some of the early Spanish expeditions where someone says, oh, we’re here, and there’s these towns full of people and these civilizations, and then a late one hundred years later, someone else comes through and it’s empty, and it’s sort of an interesting parallel to the Nevada mining town, right, And it’s like history doesn’t only move in one direction. Yeah, that’s exactly right.

00:52:41
Speaker 1: And yeah, that I think you’re probably remembering the Cobza Devaka account that we were talking about a few episodes ago, where Cabesa Devaka gives us this description in the southwest of he stays in a town every night, and one hundred years later, one hundred and fifty years later, traveling through that same landscape. I mean, there’s not a town for days, and of course it’s a landscape that’s been depopulated largely by disease, but it’s a very different world. And that’s what repeat photography is doing. It’s just doing it in a precise way that we had never gotten to experience before.

00:53:21
Speaker 3: And do you know, maybe I glossed over this in the in the episode, but it’s this seems like an idea that came about at a certain moment in time. Like I don’t I don’t imagine that the USGS folks taking these photos initially. Imagine that they were just establishing a raw point of reference, right, And I’m wondering if this is a trend that developed that has its origin with a particular photographic moment.

00:53:53
Speaker 1: Well, I think, I mean, it may well have had a particular moment of inspiration, but I think just and I don’t know this for a certainty, but just based on the timing of when the USGS began going out and asking these photographers in the nineteen seventies to go out and help them do this, I think it had to do with the one hundredth anniversary of the US Geological survey, and as they were looking back the experience of this government agency, and of course the Great Surveys of the eighteen seventies, is the first time really that the USGS has a large presence that a lot of the public recognizes. That they wanted to celebrate that, and the fact that they had these photographs sure was one of the things one of the ways they could do it. But I don’t suspect that they anticipated all the directions that the investment sigation was going to go, and you know, and I would just be very surprised if they anticipated that they were going to send somebody out to Virginia City and discover that, in fact, much.

00:55:11
Speaker 2: Of what had once been there was now wild looked very different. Anticipation of what it would look like I think. So, yeah, well, Dan, it’s been fun. You bet Randall, thank you,