Returning to the river: The Rephotographic Survey Project and the (im)possibility of capturing the same sites

Is it, as Heraclitus once pondered, possible to step in the same river twice? For the ancient Greek philosopher this was impossible for, as he proposed, “the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.” In his well-known query Heraclitus questioned the ephemerality of existence and the changing perceptions of time and space; for even if one perceives that a river and its surroundings are the same, in reality it is profoundly different. Not only has the water at one's feet changed but the combination of light, atmosphere, and weather are never the same from one moment to the next. Furthermore, the individual has changed. In any situation, she is a different person physically and mentally than she was before, and she perceives her environment in a different manner, whether she acknowledges this or not. What could be said, however, of a photograph taken of the same object or an exact site after an interval of time – a week, a year, a decade, or a century later? Indeed, one of photography's greatest abilities is to encapsulate time, to seemingly make it stop. The existence of a second (or third, or fourth…) photograph(s) of a landscape does alter one's understanding of time and place. This is also true of a scene in which no change seems to have taken place, reflecting a world in which, as scholar Roderick Nash noted, “a millennium is almost meaningless geologically” (Nash, 1967, p. 379). The camera, therefore, could be a tool for those wanting to reenter the river, so to speak, to see if it had changed.1 In the late 1970s, an important, yet neglected, photography and art project was particularly interested in the notion of stepping into the flow of time. It was, in fact, a driving pursuit of the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP) which existed from 1977 to 1980. The RSP did not invent the idea of repeat photography; repeatedly photographing a site is nearly as old as the medium. In innovations and ambition, however, it pioneered rephotography and would profoundly influence numerous other projects during its tenure and beyond. While there are many avenues of investigation that could be explored with this project, this essay specifically investigates a central aspect of the RSP: its engagement with the past.2 It will, moreover, explore the anachronistic nature of the project and the ways in which it engaged a historically saturated American West. Lastly, it highlights how their work – their photographic pendants of time and place – questioned the nature of the mythical West as well as the temporality of photographic images. The RSP consisted of photo-historian Ellen Manchester and photographers Mark Klett, JoAnn Verburg, Rick Dingus, and Gordon Bushaw. Together they retraced the footsteps of well-known nineteenth-century survey photographers like William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan across the American West, relocating, reoccupying, and rephotographing many of their historic views (Figures 1 and 2). For the RSP Heraclitus's idea was not just a theoretical exercise but a motivating force and point of inquiry that propelled their work in the West (Dingus, 1982, p. xii). The RSP is one of the most influential projects to come out of the so-called “Photo-Boom” of the 1960s and 1970s, which is gaining greater attention. Like New Topographics, it is a significant product of a period that witnessed the expansion of university photography programs across the United States, as well as a deeper study of the medium and its history and a growing acceptance of photography in galleries and museums. The members of the RSP reflect the expansion of opportunities that were available to this generation of photographers. Like their peers, they also benefited from belonging to a small but committed community of photographers and photo-historians who were invested artistically, intellectually, and emotionally in their medium. The RSP began in Rochester, New York, in 1976 through discussions among Verburg, an MFA student at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and part-time curator at the George Eastman House; Klett, a trained geologist who was working on his graduate degree in photography at the Visual Studies Workshop (VSW); and Manchester, a VSW graduate in the history of photography. Keenly aware of the intersections of contemporary art and photography, their interest in rephotographing the West was primarily conceptual in nature, but it was also fueled by a growing interest in the history of photography and the medium's historic practices and key figures. The project was also powered by a desire to work in the American West where each of the three founding members of the RSP wanted to live and work. According to Manchester, “[I] always wanted to go back just on a real naïve level to the site where Jackson stood or find one of these incredible O'Sullivan views; to see what it looked like.” She continued, “To use [rephotography] as a tool. To ask questions about pictures. How we interpret information. To establish [a] methodology for comparative surveys and to ask questions about major photographic surveys in general” (Horan & Manchester, 1978, pp. 19-20). Manchester's comments suggest, in other words, that this was more than a scavenger hunt across the West; it was a serious endeavor that they believed could produce a wide variety of results. With the assistance of two survey grants from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as well as financial and material support from the Polaroid Corporation, the RSP started following Jackson's work across Colorado in the summer of 1977. The following year the project expanded to investigate the photography of O'Sullivan and others like Andrew J. Russell. The original RSP members were also joined by two additional field photographers: Rick Dingus, an MFA student at the University of New Mexico, and Bushaw, a high school mathematics teacher and talented part-time photographer. The addition of Bushaw and Dingus enabled the project to broaden its focus to other western states including Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, California, and New Mexico. The RSP remained in the field until 1980. The motivation to revisit past places in the American West was a byproduct of a renewed interest in the history of photography. Through the work of historians like Beaumont Newhall, Helmut Gernsheim, and Van Deren Coke, the medium's history was being gathered and processed at an unprecedented rate throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, for the first time photo-history courses were taught in an increasing number of colleges and graduate school programs including RIT, VSW, and other institutes of higher education across the United States like the influential program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (Davis, 1977, pp. 12-16; McDonald, 2014, pp. 176-189). These programs encouraged students – photographers and historians – to engage with the medium's past in new and dynamic ways and to place themselves in an expanding narrative of photography, past and present. The push to engage photography's history also spurred many young photographers to seek out and experiment with arcane and forgotten photographic processes. They enthusiastically explored “alternative processes,” including cyanotypes, collotypes, gum bichromate prints, and many other formats, prompting what historian Lyle Rexer called “photography's antiquarian avant-garde” (Rexer, 2002, pp. 22-24). Photographer Bea Nettles, for example, assembled how-to manuals, or “cookbooks,” that helped make these processes more widely available (Nettles, 1977). The drive to recreate historic practices was the impetus for the creation of the Chicago Albumen Works, a collaboration between historian Joel Snyder and photographer Doug Munson, which revived the albumen and tedious wet-plate collodion processes used by the “frontier” photographers in the American West (Munson, 1976). Through a greater interest in the histories of photography, students were introduced to the work of photographers like O'Sullivan, Jackson, Jack Hillers, William Bell, and others who came to the West after the American Civil War as part of the United States Geological Surveys conducted by Clarence King, George Wheeler, Ferdinand Hayden, and John Wesley Powell.3 They also came to know and appreciate the photographs of Russell who worked for Union Pacific as it attempted to complete the Transcontinental Railroad, as well as the San Francisco-based photographer Carleton Watkins, who created monumental images of Yosemite's wonders.4 Part of the allure of working in the Rocky Mountains and beyond was the still powerful draw of the heroic and mythical West. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the survey photographers were seen as “frontier heroes” who endured “spine-tingling adventures” out west (Goetzman).5 These photographers overcame a litany of obstacles and hazards in capturing the region's rugged landscapes. Indeed, few landscapes are as connected with heroic picture making as the American West. The photographers faced everything from rattlesnakes to inhospitable Natives, freezing temperatures to “burning sun [and] blistering wind” (Bell, 1872, p. 296). They were also challenged by their process of picture-making. To create glass negatives most nineteenth-century survey photographers employed the wet-plate collodion process, a tedious, multistep practice that involved working with explosive chemicals and the necessity of keeping one's darkroom nearby for the rapid development of plates which only remained photo-sensitive while still “wet” or tacky. When moving about, the frontier photographers used pack mules that were convenient but not freed of hardship. In the Colorado Plateau, John Wesley Powell's team had a mule named Doc fall off a cliff. Surprisingly, the mule survived but the camera on its back was smashed into “10,000 pieces” (Powell, 2009, p. 392). “Photography in the field is a very difficult one,” Bell insisted in 1872, acknowledging that the production of a “successful negative” was almost hopeless with the and the working material from the mule on back the have for (Bell, 1872, p. 296). the and however, the photographers with an of images from the West, of the in the places 1872, p. In Jackson his in the field as and many a and in of the and p. The investigation of the West was not to the nineteenth Manchester, Klett, Verburg, and their were also introduced to the work of and a of photographers who were also engaged in the investigation of this American in the of these photographers were also by the nineteenth-century survey photographers. students of the medium and its and like were interested in the and processes of the have at being called “the of the but he his in to and in and New Mexico where O'Sullivan worked as part of the Survey 2002, p. 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