Ellen above the Green River: Where O'Sullivan stood over 100 years ago, August 26, 1980

Mark Klett's interest in the American West began in the late 1970s, when he worked as chief photographer for the Rephotographic Survey Project-an artistic endeavor to find and exactly duplicate the vantage points used by celebrated nineteenth-century landscape photographers. In this scene, Klett steps back from the vantage point assumed by Timothy O'Sullivan in the late 1860s. (Ellen Manchester, the Rephotographic Survey's project director, stands in O'Sullivan's position.) By including the uncropped edges of his negative, and by titling the work directly on the final print, Klett emphasizes the photograph itself as a mediation between the physical land and our historical perceptions of it.