Double exposure

Families who’ve visited Yosemite National Park and taken a snapshot of the kids in front of the same tree year after year will certainly relate.

This season’s exhibit at the Chico Museum is called Yosemite Remembered, and it features a fine-tuned version of that old family-in-front-of-the-tree tradition.

Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett used surveying equipment and Global Positioning System gear to pinpoint where noted photographs were taken as long as 140 years ago and recreated them via a photo shoot from the exact same spot.

“There’s a cliché statement that art thrives on its limitations,” said Wolfe, an assistant professor at Chico State University. (Klett teaches at Arizona State University and has been Wolfe’s mentor on the technique.) “There’s this very analytical, methodical kind of process. It always prompts questions such as, ‘Is this art?’ It has its feet in multiple camps—scientific and creative.”

During five visits over three years’ time, the pair shot with a large-format camera, usually from easily reached viewing points familiar to most Yosemite tourists. Ultimately, their work will form the basis of a fall 2005 book written by Rebecca Solnit of San Francisco.

Paul Russell, the curator of the exhibit, acknowledged that it is less “Chico-centric” than most of the museum’s displays. But so far the response has been overwhelming. “There are people in Chico who have been going to Yosemite for year after year,” he said. When word got out about the project, Chicoans lent the museum hundreds of vacation photos, postcards and other memorabilia.

Russell has divided the exhibit into two portions: One side of the museum shows the crisp, inkjet printer-generated work of Wolfe and Klett displayed alongside prints of the photos that inspired them. On the other side, a kid-friendly display invites visitors to identify animal tracks and engage in other interactive learning opportunities.

There are lessons on bear safety, a recollection of John Muir’s visit with the Bidwells, the “fire fall” at Camp Curry, a display on the Ahwahnee Hotel—even a campsite. Several original Ansel Adams gelatin silver prints are on loan from the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding. Guest speakers are being sought for the spring.

In their own photographs, Klett and Wolfe turned to classic images by Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston, Carlton E. Watkins and Ansel Adams.

“You could really see in the pictures how much the [Yosemite] Valley had changed in 130 years,” Wolfe said. And it wasn’t just the trees growing up. When he and Klett sought to recreate Adams’ “Clearing Winter Storm,” a controlled burn was taking place, and they decided to photograph the hazy landscape anyway. They called the result “Clearing Autumn Smoke.”

In recreating the images, Klett and Wolfe sought to determine not only the proper vantage point, but also the season and time of day the original pictures were shot. But their goal goes beyond the end product.

“It’s a very precise methodology that we use,” Wolfe said. “[We’re getting at] change that happens not only inside the frame but also outside, [so we can] understand a place and how it’s changed physically and culturally.

“It became pretty clear to us early on that one of the main themes we were dealing with was not necessarily time,” Wolfe said.

They did take some artistic liberties. For example, Adams, Muybridge and their kin typically did not include people in their photographs. For reasons of scale and intrigue, the Klett-Wolfe team has. In one case, Wolfe carefully hung on a tree branch that was obscuring a view. In another, he “literally stepped into the photograph” and is shown swatting mosquitoes in the water—an obscure reference to Weston. One display shows a series of shots digitally pieced together to show a 360-degree view.

Overall, Wolfe said, "It was an interesting creative experience."