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

The natural and photographic history, science, and politics of a national treasure

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.