Third View Project 1997 – 2000
July 21 – September 3, 2007
Third View added a third image to the pairs made by the Rephotographic Survey Project. It began exactly twenty years after the first rephotography project and used the same methods to repeat photographs made for the western surveys of the 1860’s and 70’s. Photographs for this project continued to be made on film, but otherwise Third View differed from the RSP in the extended use of new technologies.
Making rephotographs became the common basis for each site visit, but other images and information were collected during fieldwork and gave rise to completely new content. The materials collected varied from site to site, but usually included video footage, sound recordings, still photographs, and sometimes physical artifacts. The project compiled these contextual materials for use into an interactive DVD that ultimately became the main venue for the project’s work. The DVD was published along with the book Third Views, Second Sights in 2004. The disk contained rephotographs, a variety of multimedia videos, maps, field notes, computer animations, oral history interviews, and other items that could be explored in a part of the disk called “The Journey.” The disk also contained a searchable database of rephotographic images from both Third View and the RSP tied to site location name and photographer.
Like the RSP, Third View was a collaboration, but unlike the RSP the team for this project traveled and worked together in the field through the project’s duration. The participants were graduate students in the photo program at Arizona State University, including Byron Wolfe, Kyle Bajakian, Toshi Ueshina and Michael Marshall. Starting the second year, writer William L Fox joined the team and wrote the field notes published on the DVD.
The fieldwork took the team to over 110 sites located in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho. Fieldwork was intentionally experimental. One incident in 1998 included an early attempt to create a blog-like website based on a fieldtrip journey through Nevada, where the team had mixed results uploading text and photographs made with an early 1.5 megapixel digital camera (my first) via dial up modems in motel rooms. We carried a carload of tower computers and CRT monitors into the field as an experiment, and discovered that blogging technology at that time was a little premature for our aspirations.
https://www.markklett.com/projects/rephotographic-survey-project