Author Description

In 1901 John Muir described Yosemite: "Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another." Time and the Tuolumne Landscape presents a spellbinding glimpse of this endless song. Through repeat photography, the process whereby a scene in an old picture is precisely rephotographed, Thomas and Geraldine Vale use over eighty photo pairs to document continuity and change in the Tuolumne landscape from Muir's time to our own. In their consideration of change, the Vales offer a meditation on rock and water, vegetation, and human impact. Natural process is comparable, in one sense, to an intricate timepiece with myriad wheels spinning at varying speeds, some stopping or starting without warning, others reversing direction, a few steady on course. Which changes we see, and which changes we comprehend, are limited by the scale of human time. This book is an opportunity to move beyond that constraint to see, with Muir, the whirl and flow of nature.