Photo historian Ellen Manchester is associated with practically every significant landscape project made in Colorado during the 1970s and 80s. Foremost among them are The Great West exhibition and book (CU Boulder, 1977, with Sandy Hume and Gary Metz) and the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP), which compared 19th century survey images with contemporary photographs taken from exactly the same vantage point a century later.
I first met Ellen in the 1990s in San Francisco, when I was Associate Director of SF Camerawork and her husband, Robert Dawson, served on the board of directors. Her connection to Colorado photography is one of those unexpected convergences that have marked so much of my research.
Ellen Manchester, Project Director, The Rephotographic Survey Project, Colorado Mountain College, Breckenridge, CO. ca. 1978. Courtesy of Ellen Manchester.
She began work on what became RSP soon after she was hired to direct the photography program at Colorado Mountain College, Breckenridge (CMC) in 1976. Her concept for the project was inspired by seeing the Mountain of the Holy Cross and recalling William Henry Jackson’s 1873 photograph of it. She shared her thoughts with Mark Klett, then a student at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, and they decided to develop the idea of rephotographing sites to gauge land use over the previous century.
Kenda North: Rephotographic Survey Field Trip (Mark Klett, center; Ellen Manchester far left). Courtesy of Kenda North.
A grant from the NEA the following year enabled Klett and JoAnn Verburg to join her in Breckenridge to teach classes and begin fieldwork. The first year’s work was limited to Colorado and produced a manageable grouping of twenty-seven “rephotographs” of Jackson prints from the 1870s.
After the first year, Verburg left to coordinate Polaroid’s program for artists using their giant 20 x 24 camera. Rick Dingus and Gordon Bushaw joined the team, and the two plus Klett worked individually in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, rephotographing an expanded pool of source photographers that now included Alexander Gardner, John Hillers, A. J. Russell, and most importantly Timothy O’Sullivan, whose objectivity and immaculate composition had earned him an iconic status within the New Topographics community.
In 1979 (the third and last year of photography) Manchester left CMC to direct photo workshops at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities. In what was “a difficult separation from Colorado Mountain College” Manchester took the project (and Klett) with her. Bushaw joined them in Idaho and was tasked with rephotographing O’Sullivan imagery from the Great Basin regions of Nevada, Utah, and California. Dingus continued a side project at the Zuni Pueblo in Arizona. (He returned to the region in the eighties to document Indigenous rock art for Marks in Place, a project organized by CU Boulder’s Charlie Roitz.)
Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project book cover. Photographs: Left, Andrew J. Russell, 1968. Hanging Rock, foot of Echo Canon. (Western Americana Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) Right, Rick Dingus for the Rephotographic Survey Project, 1978. Hanging Rock, foot of Echo Canyon, Utah. Published by the University of New Mexico Press, 1984.
In total, RSP’s team had meticulously rephotographed 122 photographs had been throughout the Southwest in color and black-and-white. A catalog/report titled “Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project” was published in 1984 (University of New Mexico Press). Merry A. Foresta links the impact of RSP with that of New Topographics. Ultimately, she writes, the two projects “proposed aesthetic revelations that could sometimes reach beyond themselves towards areas of moral concern. The ordinary, simple act of describing the landscape suddenly became loaded with responsibility. These developments … completely altered contemporary notions about photography.”[i]
The Rephotographic Survey team near Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado. 1979/80? L-R: Michael Keyes, Ellen Manchester, Mark Klett, Richard Neill, JoAnn Verburg, (? filmmaker), Chris Felver.
In the wake of its publication, many like-minded projects have appeared. In Colorado, John Fielder published several successful books using William Henry Jackson as his source imagery, and Grant Collier rephotographed late-19th century photographs of Colorado made by his great-great grandson Joseph Collier. Most recently, historic images of downtown Pueblo have been rephotographed by John Wark.
In 1996, Klett initiated Third View, a rephotographic project that revisited many of RSP’s original sites. Surprisingly given the accelerating pace of society, the new work revealed little change in the twenty years between projects. Third View’s team supplemented their cameras (now digital) with computers, CD-ROMS, an internet blog, and the gathering of artifacts found in the field. In doing so a new multi-media approach to field work was introduced.[ii]
Please feel free to email me, leave a comment, and “Subscribe” to receive notices of new posts. Visit “ColoradoPhotoHistory” on Instagram and Facebook to see more images. The next post narrates the story of Colorado Springs photographer Myron Wood, whose achievements include a book of portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe at Abiquiu, NM, and an intimate document of the southern Colorado Catholic sect known as the Penitentes.
[i] Foresta, Between Home and Heaven. 44.
[ii] Third View is available as a book and CD-ROM (Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William L. Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron Wolfe, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press in association with the Center of American Places, 2004); and as a website: accessed November 2020, http://www.thirdview.org/3v/home/index.html.