Originally trained as a geologist, Mark Klett is one of the preeminent contemporary photographers of the American West. Working in collaboration, he and his student, Byron Wolfe, spent three years trekking through Yosemite National Park, joined by the writer Rebecca Solnit. They followed in the footsteps of photographers who had created iconic images of the park across history, seeking visual traces of history that might highlight the way visitors’ experiences and expectations of nature have changed over time. Klett and Wolfe quickly realized that, regardless of Yosemite’s more than 760,000 acres, photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston had made similar photographs decades apart, from locations only yards away from each other.

The composite photograph of Lake Tenaya is made of four views taken from the same bank, where Muybridge first made his 1872 Mount Hoffman, from Lake Tenaya, Mammoth Plate #48, reveling in the vast, raw grandeur of nature, followed by Weston’s Lake Tenaya in 1937 and Adams’s Tenaya Lake, Mount Conness, Yosemite National Park, c. 1942, when Yosemite had been well-mapped and its beauty could be contemplated formally. In their 2002 Byron Swatting High-Country Mosquitoes at Lake Tenaya (their personal contribution to the four individual images that make up this larger work), Klett and Wolfe paid homage to the earlier photographers, while animating the landscape with their contemporary presence, compressing the time between their mutual experiences of the transformed landscape.