Photo Credit: © Color Photography by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe; Inset by William Bell / Courtesy of National Archives Klett and Wolfe found two images made by William Bell showing two adjacent buttes, then located the precise vantage point (at the Moenkopi Formation near Lee's Ferry, Arizona) and rephotographed a panoramic view in color. Left Inset: Headlands North of the Colorado River Plateau near Paria, taken by William Bell, 1872. Right Inset: Chocolate Butte near Mouth of the Paris, Arizona, William Bell, 1872.

Collaborating on a two-year project called Charting the Canyon, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe have been re-photographing a variety of iconic views of the Grand Canyon and using digital technology to present old images in new contexts. The old images, which include paintings and drawings as well as photographs, are superimposed on new photographs—and vice versa—with provocative results.

"We call them mash-ups of different times, experiences and ways of looking at the place," Wolfe says.

For instance, they found two images made by 19th century photographer William Bell while on a geological expedition. The sepia-toned images show two adjacent buttes. Klett and Wolfe located the scene and Bell's precise vantage point, then re-photographed a panoramic view in color. That contemporary image shows an RV cruising down a road that doesn't exist in Bell's images, which are superimposed on the panorama like windows looking into the past. The juxtaposition underscores a jarring sign of progress.

For another image, Klett and Wolfe found the vantage point for illustrator William Henry Holmes's 1882 drawing called "Panorama from Point Sublime." They photographed bits and pieces of the scene at various times of day, under different lighting conditions, and then superimposed them on Holmes's drawing. The result is a series of small photographic windows on the Holmes illustration, which draw viewers' attention to the elusive "reality" of the canyon and the subjectivity of everyone who attempts to depict it.

The works range in size from 20 by 20 inches to a panorama nearly 10 feet wide. About 30 of them are on display through July 12 at the Phoenix Art Museum. And while it is tempting and easy to intellectualize the work through the lens of post-modernism, Wolfe cautions against that.

"It looks like we had the intention of revealing something about the medium, but that's not the driving question behind what we're doing. It's more about being curious, having fun, and posing questions," he explains. The work he and Klett do amounts to a "conversation" with visual artifacts.

"This is about making pictures that respond to our own personal experience, making pictures that respond to how a place has been represented in the past, wondering what's changed, what connections can be made, and out of that comes how people represented a place over time."

The Grand Canyon project has its roots in Klett's previous work. Since the 1970s he has been re-photographing sites in the American West that were first photographed in the 19th century. In the 1990s, he worked with several students, including Wolfe, re-photographing various sites. Forty-three of the before-and-after pairings appeared in a 2004 book titled Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West.

Klett and Wolfe have collaborated off and on since then. The Grand Canyon project started about two years ago when they were looking for new venues beyond Yosemite, where they had done a lot of previous work, and new ways to re-invent the methodology of re-photography. Rather than simply present before-and-after images, they started re-contextualizing the old and new images by combining them.

"By the time we got to the Grand Canyon, we were tired of a methodical [before and after] approach. We were wondering what we could do to push it. We were rethinking everything. It became more playful," Klett says.

He and Wolfe search various online archives for the historic images, including the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Online Archive of California. They've also mined the collection of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "We're very interested in pictures that were influential in some way—pictures, paintings and drawings that somehow shaped our understanding of what the Grand Canyon is like," Wolfe explains. The works include Thomas Moran paintings, Holmes drawings, and Edward Weston and Ansel Adams photographs, among other sources. They've also used vernacular images, including post cards.

"You have to come up with a lot of pictures for anything to really work," Klett says. They go through thousands of pictures, making print proofs of selected images and then categorizing them by specific location in folders.

Twice a year, they travel to the Grand Canyon in search of the vantage points from which the images were made. (Klett says the "image density" of the Grand Canyon is high—with half a dozen or more images made from the same vantage point at different times.) Finding the sites usually isn't difficult, because the original images were so often made from trails and turnouts that still exist, Wolfe says. Once they find an original vantage point, they start shooting new images that closely match the perspective of the archival images. The technique for doing that is primarily a visual process, but it can be done precisely by matching measurements between foreground and background objects.

"We're less concerned now about exactly matching [old and new images] because sometimes it's interesting to have slightly different vantage points," says Wolfe.

Artistically, Wolfe and Klett use a process of trial and error and serendipity to see what visual connections they can make between old and new images. Both shoot with Aptus 65 digital backs mounted on a medium-format camera (Klett's is a Silvestri Flexicam, while Wolfe uses a Mamiya 645 AFDII). They also carry Leica D-LUX3 cameras for taking visual notes, and for grabbing fleeting images, such as a bird flying by, that they couldn't capture in time with their tripod-mounted medium-format cameras.

While in the field, they download their images to laptops, and output rough prints on a battery-powered Canon PIXMA i90 printer. They can then start juxtaposing their images with rough prints of the archival images, and make mock-ups of their ideas, just as landscape painters might make field sketches.

"It allows us to make a lot of pictures, sift through a whole bunch of ideas, and refine things as we're going, so we can leave a place knowing we've developed an idea we're excited about or not, and decide whether we need to re-visit the place or not," Wolfe explains.

Back in their studios they divide the work of compositing the final image files in Photoshop. Because Klett teaches at Arizona State University in Phoenix, while Wolfe teaches at California State University in Chico, the process of compositing the final image files takes place via e-mail. They also use Google Documents to share image files along the way. The final image files, Wolfe says, can range in size from 2 to 4 gigabytes. They print the final images on Crane Museo Portfolio rag paper using Epson 9800 printers.

Klett and Wolfe say they'll continue the Grand Canyon project for one more year. This month, they'll make another trip to the canyon. "The ideas get richer and richer. We keep thinking of [new] things we can do," Klett says. For instance, a series of images they shot lost year showing hikers progressing down a trail has opened up narrative story-telling possibilities. "I'm excited about how we can combine space and time and narrative in one image," Klett says.

© Color Photography by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe; Inset by William Bell / Courtesy of National Archives At the Canyon's edge. An image by Klett and Wolfe from the foot of the Toroweap to the "Devil's Anvil" overhang with an upstream view of the Colorado River. Insets, left to right: Canyon of Kanab Wash Looking North; canyon of Kanab Wash; walls of the Grand Canyon Looking East, Colorado River; looking south across the Grand Canyon, Colorado River, William Bell, 1872.