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

Calling on the photographic record made of the American West from 150 to 100 years ago, modern photographers have repeated many of the same scenes and found remarkable differences in the ecology and look of western landscapes. The question is, why such change? Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Repeat photography done 100 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 Florys, and this is The American West. Time and time again, the fascinating evidence from Western repeat photography.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  In episode 13 of this podcast, I said a few things about the West's great 19th century landscape photographers. For almost four decades, from the 1860s through the 1890s, photographers like Edward Muybridge, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and their assistants lugged hundreds of pounds of equipment: heavy 8x10 wet plate cameras, tripods, fragile glass negatives, entire portable dark rims, in Muybridge's case, ropes and pulleys to lure himself down precipitous canyon walls to photograph the West.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  They composed shots in their viewfinders, inserted dripping glass plates to capture a negative, then removed lens 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 possibilities of the West to Easterners. But O'Sullivan, and for much of his career, Jackson too, was photographing the best scenery

• 3:23Speaker 04

  in the West as a government employee of the brand-new United States Geological Survey. Its so-called "Great Surveys," post-Civil War explorations into intriguing parts of the West, led by 20-and-30-somethings John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, Ferdinand Hayden, and George Wheeler, mapped rivers, examined mineral possibilities, and puzzled out the geological story of the West.

• 3:57Speaker 04

  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's point in the Canyon of the Yellowstone that most assume 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 endeavor to convey how a landscape made a viewer feel, rather than produce a precise rendering of geology and form.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  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 1860s and 70s 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 worked in the West 100 years or more ago, were earth-shattering in their time. They provided a kind of first view, or at least a first entirely believable view of the West for the American public.

• 5:27Speaker 04

  Since then, these 150-year-old images have become just as critical to understanding the West we now know as they were for people in the 1870s, but for a very different reason.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Now, imagine the possibilities of pairing a baseline image from the 1860s, or even the early 1900s 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 100 years apart, help resolve some pressing modern question?

• 6:53Speaker 04

  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 1984, the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. 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.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  As the introduction of "Second View," the Refotographic Survey Project told its readers, between 1977 and 1979, this project sent out several modern professional photographers into the West to reshoot 120 of the scenes captured by the 19th-century great survey photographers. Relying on the topographic details and the scale in the original photographs, and on knowledge of the fixed-millimeter zoom size of the lenses on 19th-century 8x10 cameras

• 8:14Speaker 04

  so those could be replicated, the modern-day team plotted out a technique using geometric 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.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  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 gestat interpretation.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  So, what does a Western landscape say 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

• 9:54Speaker 04

  an unexpected similarity of appearance 150 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 a recognizable sameness, 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.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  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 1999. 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 1991. The most recent is an online repeat photography project by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Northern Rocky Mountains Science Center on the glaciers of Glacier

• 11:15Speaker 04

  National Park, Montana, a project completed in 2019. 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. The big breakthrough was the 1851 invention of the collodion wet plate process using silver nitrate as a light-sensitive medium.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Capturing an image sensitive to varying light during the years of the earlier daguerreotype 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,

• 12:41Speaker 04

  photography using 8x10 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 60 pounds, plus another 30 pounds for the absolutely essential tripod to hold it steady. The gear so heavy, it had to be transported almost to the scene of any shoot in a wagon or on the back of a mule. 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.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Then back at your wagon, you coated a fragile glass plate the size of a sheet of typing paper with collodion 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 darkroom. There you developed it in an acid bath,

• 14:08Speaker 04

  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 or darkroom chemicals to eat away the skin on your fingers.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  But to their credit, and our gratitude, they did it. Mybridge, 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 look today as if they imagined the landscapes they saw, hanging

• 15:16Speaker 04

  in gilded frames in the anteroom 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, at a level of detail few painters ever attempted. 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.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Because many of you will be listening to this, rather than seeing the paired photographs on YouTube or Apple TV, I'll need 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 Boucham and Mark Klett commence with double-paired recent photographs.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  ...of a scene Timothy O'Sullivan shot in 1869 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 Ocker Mountains to the west of the city, and the white rectangles of the houses appear tiny and overwhelmed by a vast natural setting. By contrast, Gordon Bouchard's 1978 photo of the exact scene shows a modern urban setting, dense with planted trees and framing Mormon Temple Square, occupying a full third

• 17:29Speaker 04

  of the landscape in view. Interestingly, even the foreground vegetation has now changed from bunch grasses in 1869 to what appears to be exotic cheat grass in 1978. In Mark Klett's 1997 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.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  In another second view pairing, the original is once again a Timothy O'Sullivan photograph, this one taken in 1872 of the Horseshoe Bend of the Green River in present Utah, the exposure from a high overlook called Flaming Gorge Ridge. O'Sullivan's photo is a Romantic Age view of a sublime Western wilderness. The U 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

• 18:53Speaker 04

  juniper-speckled hills with the intriguing flaming gorge angling through the middle of the view far below. In Mark Klett's 1978 photo, from the exact spot where O'Sullivan stood 106 years earlier, two-thirds of the same scene is now filled with the unruffled waters of the flaming gorge reservoir. Most of the Half Grapefruit Mountain in the distance still stands above the waterline, but all the wildlands below, including the horseshoe bend of the green and the gorge that gave the place its name, now lie underwater.

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  So, yes, change as expected. But the West isn't so easy to predict. It's been a region of madcap 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 1860s Virginia City. When you see O'Sullivan's photo of the elaborate buildings and smokestacks of a quartz mill set among barren hills in 1868, you immediately assume

• 21:58Speaker 04

  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 Klett's photo of a 1979 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

• 22:42Speaker 04

  in a region as arid as the West can recover their health in time. In the Southwest, particularly in Arizona and southern Colorado, paired photographs taken a century or more apart also tell us a little something about geologic time. Assuming that photographic documenters among us will still be doing repeat photography a few centuries down the line from now, paired 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.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  William Henry Jackson's 1873 photographs of rock hoodoos in southern Colorado, matched with Joanne Verberg's 1977 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 Chay don't look at all different in 1978 than when O'Sullivan first photographed them in 1873.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Only the vegetation growth along the canyon bottoms intermittent stream has changed. Which is a way of introducing one of the most dramatic and at first glance puzzling differences in the look of the Old West and the new one as revealed by repeat photography. 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. For 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

• 24:55Speaker 04

  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 ecological processes.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  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 1921 photograph of Ram's Head Mountain, shot by W.T. Lee, matched up with a 1986 photo, taken in the exact spot by T.T. Veblen and D.C. Lorenz.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  True, across the 65 years between these two photographs, the small lake at the foot of the mountain has become a much larger reservoir, an 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, that requires a double take here. In just six decades, the number of ponderosa pines has easily quadrupled. That same change, from a far more open west as far back as photographs exist,

• 26:59Speaker 04

  to a significantly more densely forested one in our time, exists to marvel over everywhere repeat photography has been done in the region. Compare William Henry Jackson's 1872 photograph of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone with Klett and Bouchard's 1978 photo of that scene, where tree growth nearly obscures the view, and this ecological change is evident in Yellowstone too.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  It's everywhere apparent in Colorado. An 1899 photo of the Red Hill Valley northwest of Boulder shows a beautifully grass valley swale with a mere sprinkling of pines on the slopes. The matching 1984 photo by Veblen and Lorenz 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 1900 that shows a landscape that's roughly 60% grassland,

• 28:15Speaker 04

  40% scattered pines with unforested peaks. In the Veblen-Lorenz match from 1984, grassland is all but invisible. Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs have increased by several times over and now blanket the formerly open mountain tops. A forest takeover, ecologists believe, commenced sometime in the 1890s.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Since this is the story almost everywhere in the West and in several different ecological zones, including lower elevation pinion juniper country and even plains 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 1900 and on, earlier in time, so much more open with much more grassland and far fewer trees?

• 29:36Speaker 04

  The ready answer, of course, is fire. As a mostly arid and windy region characterized by summer thunderstorms that readily produce lightning strike ignitions, most of the West burned easily and did so repeatedly and regularly. Its ecologies, in fact, 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.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  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 effect beneficial outcomes for them. Fires opened up the country for seeing and for travel. Fires beat back the spread of shrubs like sagebrush, whose oils make it highly susceptible to death by flames, clearing the country for grasses that elk and horses prefer. Fires promoted berry patches and opened the ground to be able to spot snakes.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  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 smoke-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 19th 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,

• 31:41Speaker 04

  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.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  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 1900, 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 1910.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  It lit up more than 3 million acres, inflicting wholesale destruction on entire towns and killed 87 people. In its aftermath, the new U.S. 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.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  A thick aggregation of spreading shrubs plus seas of sprouting samplings 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 pinyon pine forests similarly became targets of an epidemic of pine bark beetles that killed 45 million trees in the southwest in the first years

• 34:05Speaker 04

  of this century. Stories like these are the accompaniment to second-view photographs of a far greener West that replaced what O'Sullivan and Jackson once saw.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  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 150 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 1871, William Henry Jackson took a photo of the Soda Butte Flood Plain winding through the future national park.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Both in the foreground and farther along the stream, beneath the butte, native willows appear flourishing along the edges of the stream bed. 119 years later, in 1990, 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 Flood Plain in his 1990 photo. That matched set of photographs takes us into the heart of controversy.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  The year Houston took 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 1926, deliberately removed as part of America's war on predators. In their absence, by the 1990s, an estimated 25,000 to 31,000 elk were summering in the park. Judging from photographic and other evidence, across that same time span, roughly 1930

• 36:26Speaker 04

  to 1990, at least 50% of all the willows and young aspen stands in Yellowstone disappeared.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  The relationship between the 60-year absence of a top-of-the-food-chain predator like the gray wolf and burgeoning elk herds in Yellowstone is by now a generally-accepted ecological cause and effect. So is the elk’s attraction to the young shoots of deciduous willows and aspens. In a later episode, I’ll take up 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. But for this part of the story, the differences in the paired photos of the Sotobute drainage

• 37:20Speaker 04

  between 1871 and 1990 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. 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 1997, sensitive to an increasingly fluctuating Western climate and to arguments by climatologists

• 38:04Speaker 04

  that carbon released in the Earth’s atmosphere by the two centuries of burning fossil fuels was instrumental in those wild fluctuations, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Northern Rocky Mountains Science Center hatched the idea of doing a repeat photography project on the glaciers of Glacier National Park, Montana. Established in 1910 at the urging of conservationists like George Bird Grenell and University of Montana biologist Morton J. Elrod, Glacier National Park, high against the border of Alberta, Canada, was a wonderland

• 38:47Speaker 04

  of peaks, snow fields, and glaciers. When Glacier joined America’s crown jewel Western parks, there were 80 named glaciers within its boundaries.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  Finally completed in 2019, 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 Park's case, the baseline photos were more recent, shot from 1887 to 1943, while selected photographers shot the paired modern photos from 1997 to 2019.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  The most famous glacier in the park has always been Grinnell Glacier, one of the true ice giants of the Northern Rockies. When Grinnell Glacier was photographed in 1910 by Morton Elrod, its thick glacial ice blanketed two-thirds of Elrod'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 1910, only the mountain's vertical walls stood clear of ice. In 2016,

• 40:34Speaker 04

  photographer L. McKeon of the USGS repeated Elrod's shot from 106 years earlier. The change is jaw-dropping. By 2016, Grinnell Glacier took up no more than 20% of a scene it once entirely dominated. Where the bulk of the ice had once rested, had now become a glacial cirque lake at the foot of Mount Gould. The staggering shrinkage of this famous park glacier in a bit more than a century had, in fact, now split Grinnell into two ice remnants. A former piece of Grinnell,

• 41:18Speaker 04

  now hanging onto garden wall ridge in the right of the scene, is today called Salamander Glacier.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  The National Park's Boulder Glacier was also photographed by Elrod in 1910, at which time it draped cape-like across 30% of Elrod's composition of the park's Livingston Range. When USGS photographers located Elrod's perch and repeated his shot in 2007, 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

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Peak, with snow and ice now occupying less than 5% of the scene. By 2019, glaciers in the park had been melting so rapidly that only 26 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 in paired repeat photographs. And the same is true of this kind of evidence generally. Repeat photographs that show us glaciers or none, or forests where there were once

• 42:50Speaker 04

  grasslands, merely tell us that the West we now live in or visit is a very different world than the West that occupied the same space on the ground 100 or 150 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. It's up to our science and our analytical primate brains to explain and grapple with the reasons why.

• 43:44Speaker 01

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• 45:15Speaker 05

  So Dan, in this, in this episode, you talk about the, the practice of repeat photography. And whenever that, whenever this subject comes up.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  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.

• 45:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  And it's something that's very accessible for, 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, in looking at two of the same viewpoints from different areas in time.

• 46:08Speaker 04

  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, 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

• 46:48Speaker 04

  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 at, 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 150 or so years. I mean, photography only dates back to the 1840s and you don't really get images that are good enough to do something like repeat photography comparisons until

• 47:29Speaker 04

  this period that I talk about in the episode where in the 1860s and 1870s, these photographers who were 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 looked like. It's a powerful thing. I mean, I 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.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  I'll pick out a spot and 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 in these spans from the 1870s to the 1990s or something.

• 48:34Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah, that was, actually, my next question was, have you dabbled in this? And I, given your background in photography, I was guessing that you had.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  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.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  But I think you, in this chapter, you use a lot of sort of counterpoint examples to demonstrate that change is much more, maybe fluid. You use the example of Salt Lake building up and at the same time, a mine, a mining town disappearing.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 05

  And so there's not always the change that you expect in these photographs.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  No, 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, more cities are going to spread. And that sequence of photographs of Salt Lake from the 1870s through the 1990s.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Is very much that each one, I mean, the, the last two photographs are only about 12 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 Quartzmill site there back in the 1870s that you look at it today and I'm, I can recall very vividly, the first time I flipped open the pages of Second View, that USGS sponsored repeat photography project

• 50:47Speaker 04

  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 mine tailings piles and all sorts of disturbance, it looks as if there actually is a possibility to, to return and rewild the landscape to something that it originally looked like.

• 51:28Speaker 05

  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, but in, in some instances, in a lot of instances, history on the landscape might be legible in the absence of development, right? Like I, I was thinking about wilderness area. I was thinking, my, my thinking jumped around a lot as 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.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  And I was thinking about some of the things that like you won't see values. Uh, 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.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Without the analysis or the explanation, 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 more than likely another sequence of steps to disentangle what has actually happened here.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  Why you're seeing a West that looks like this in the 1870s or 1880s and one 100 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.

• 53:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  In the 19th century than today. And I think the reason was because I probably came at those paired images initially with the notion that, okay, in our own time, we're obviously, we're building a lot of housing, we're 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 dense, beautiful forests. 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.

• 54:36Speaker 05

  What 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, the most obvious answer is what happens when people, when, when European, Euro-American people get to a place is, oh, deforestation happens, right?

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  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.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 05

  And then you get another one 100 years later and you have to sort of piece together how you reconcile the two.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  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, 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, 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.

• 56:09Speaker 05

  Right.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  I mean, you're a long way from that kind of precision. Somebody may be describing what a scene looks like that's 15 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.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  Right. 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 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.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And yeah, that I think you're probably remembering the Cabeza de Vaca account that we were talking about a few episodes ago, where Cabeza de Vaca gives us this description in the southwest of, he stays in a town every night. And a hundred years later, 150 years later, somebody 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.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  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 imagined 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?

• 58:06Speaker 04

  Well, I think, I mean, it may well have had a particular moment of inspiration.

• 58:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 04

  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 1970s to, to go out and help them do this, I think it had to do with the 100th anniversary of the US Geological Survey. And as they were looking back at, at the experience of this government agency, and of course, the great surveys of the 1870s is the first time really that the USGS has a large presence that a lot of the public recognizes.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  That they wanted to celebrate that and the fact that they had these photographs.

• 59:01Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  Was one of the things, one of the ways they could do it. But I don't suspect that they anticipated all the directions.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  That, that the investigation was going to go. And you know, and I, 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 of what had once been there was now wild looking.

• 59:27Speaker 05

  Very different anticipation of what it would look like in a hundred years.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah.

• 59:33Speaker 05

  Well, Dan, it's been fun.

• 59:34Speaker 04

  You bet, Randall.

• 59:35Speaker 05

  Thanks.

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