My first work in the National Parks was in
the late 1970s when I was working on a
project called the rephotographic survey project
and the ideal behind that project
was to go back to the precise locations of
where 19th century photographs were
taken in the American West and these
where the first photographs made in the
American West between the years of 1867 and 1872.
And some of the photographs that we
relocated in and repeated and rephotographed
in the same position were taken in the
National Parks.
There was a small group of people coming out
of the East, sort of the elite educators,
journalists, artists, writers who started
seeing these landscapes as something that
was unique to America and needed to be
preserved, but how to bring that story back?
So artists started painting the landscape,
people started writing about the landscape
and it was these stories as well as these
paintings that really caught the imagination
of the American people.
It was these sort of stories as well as
visuals that allowed for Congress to
understand what was out there and
what needed to be preserved.
I am photographing with the Dagguerreotype
process. It's reflective, it's known as
a mirror with a memory. People believe
that if you hold up this mirror it will
remember you and it will remember your
likeness.
So it became very poetic at the beginning
of photography.
So with that idea I wanted to see myself
in my photographs. I want other people to
see themselves.
Especially for people of color, for immigrants
to see their own face in this majestic
American Landscape and that's one reason why
I've been photographing the National Parks
all these years.
For a long time I think I lost interest in
photographing the National Parks, largely
because they had been photographed so much
by other people, a lot of us in fine arts
photography felt "well, that's been done,
we need to move on."
I started a project in 2007 with former
student and now colleague Byron Wolfe.
He and I began to work at the Grand Canyon
re-looking or rethinking the historic
images made at the Grand Canyon made
from the 19th century to the mid 20th
century. So we started to go back to find
where those pictures were made and make
new pictures from the same vantage point.
The sound of the environment is an
important indicator of the health of
environment and that by working with
community and having community volunteers,
citizen scientists if you like, who we give
these little recorders to and they go out
and they make recordings at the same
locations in the National Park every
month and so slowly we're building up
a database of the history of the sound of
those locations.
So we started doing that in National Parks
because of course National Parks are
pristine landscapes that are protected by
the Nation because we see them as being
critical habitat and critical examples of
those landscapes and of course apart from
that they're extraordinarily beautiful
places to go and see and quietly listen.
and with these little recorders and a
technique we use called ambasonics
we have four little microphones in here
and it captures a full sphere of sound
and so that's one thing and then we realized
that we could pair that with virtual
reality and take panoramic images at those
locations and then create the sense of
really being there so as you look around
the virtual reality is generating what you
see but also what you hear from that
perspective.