Description
In 1963 the waters began rising behind Glen Canyon Dam and 170 miles of the Colorado River slowly disappeared as the riverbed and surrounding canyons filled with water. Environmentalists considered it a disaster and mourned Glen Canyon as gone forever. The Sierra Club joined forces with photographer Eliot Porter to document what would be lost under the dam's waters, resulting in the publication of the landmark 1963 photobook
The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado.
But in an unexpected victory that speaks to the pervasive disaster of climate change, the reservoir is now declining and the Colorado River is coming back. Photographers Byron Wolfe (born 1967) and Mark Klett (born 1952), along with writer Rebecca Solnit (born 1961), spent five years exploring the place as expectations and possibilities changed, and the river reemerged at the upper end of the reservoir.
In dialogue with Porter's book, Klett and Wolfe retraced the physical locations where Porter made his photographs, now often submerged by the reservoir's waters. Solnit's accompanying text meditates on the meanings and histories of the place, drawing from both the trio's explorations and archival research.
Drowned River is a book about climate change, about "the madness of the past and the terror of the future" (as Solnit puts it). But it is also a book about how photography can describe beauty and trouble simultaneously, and what it takes to understand a place and to come to terms with the changes we have set in motion.
About the Author
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, a historian, an activist, and the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell's Roses (2022), Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020), Men Explain Things to Me (2014), A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), and Hope in the Dark (2004). She writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late. She is based in San Francisco.
A former geologist turned photographer, Mark Klett is the author of seventeen photographic books, including Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project and Revealing Territory, a collection that examines the way people have experienced and left their presence on the land. His work has been exhibited and published internationally and is held in more than eighty museum collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, and J. Paul Getty Museum. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, among others, and was named photographer of the year by Friends of Photography in 1993. Klett currently serves as Regents' Professor of Art and Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University.
Reviews
Porter's images brought attention to the place, and galvanized the Sierra Club and the growing environmental movement's opposition to similar projects in the future.-- "PDN's Notable Photo Books of 2018"
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