"In the storytelling traditions of virtually every indigenous culture, stories don’t unfold abstractly, like Little Red Riding Hood skipping through unnamed woods; they take place.”
-Robert Moor from On Trails
March 2018
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I often get drawn into sorting through bins of old photos at thrift stores and tell myself that I’ll find one last striking photo in order to call it quits. Last week it turned out to be a shot of Half Dome taken from Glacier Point in Yosemite. Coincidentally I was there just weeks before, so I was thrilled about this find.
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The coincidence continued as I flipped it and saw it was actually a photo postcard of a style whose type I had swiped for my own cards. I had been at Yosemite with my brother and excitedly messaged him. He suggested we try and figure out exactly where it was shot, though I didn’t have high hopes as I didn’t really shoot many environmental shots of the large area that Glacier Point encompasses.
[ .-. ] [ .-. ]
Later that night I did look through and realized I had none from my recent trip there. Then I checked photos from a previous visit a year and a half prior when I shot the branch photo. Note the same branch here.
I noticed a small crag of rock in the foreground that appears in both images.
I was stunned…
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I overlaid them. Whoever shot the photo on the postcard stood a couple steps to my left and a hundred years before me.
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December 2019
Place can hold a presence and magic and the more that unravels around it, the more treasured it becomes to me. A couple weeks ago this story blew wide open (while also looping back around on other work/obsessions)…
Months after my discovery above I returned to my same tree and lined up the card confirming that it was indeed taken just a couple steps to the left. I shot many more photos and even collected some pine needles from the two adjoining spots (shhh, don’t tell the National Park Service)
I foraged for more Yosemite photos and found others which appeared to be the same. This led me to Arthur Pillsbury who had a studio in the valley producing many souvenir photos and postcards. He’s the one who photographed my postcard and stood alongside me so many years ago.
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150 Summers
This project followed John Muir’s journal entries as he rambled through Yosemite 150 years ago last summer. It was quite time consuming as I easily got sidetracked by further Yosemite research. I spent hours each night on various tangents discovering scans of Muirs original journals and a book from the 1920’s of native Miwok lore published online. A few weeks ago I finally ordered an original copy and thumbed through only to find the exact same photo as my original postcard.
Only it wasn’t…
I then began looking up Pillsbury himself and found this website dedicated to his work. The header image of the entire site is a panorama shot from the same location as my card.
At first I thought perhaps mine was a crop of the photo above but then realized the clouds weren’t quite the same in any of the versions. They were slightly different in each but certainly taken on the same day as the clouds were generally similar, the shadows hardly changed, and they were all taken from almost that precise spot.
Wanting to see other versions, I was sucked into a “Pillsbury Glacier Point” image search. I found several very lo-res images but then was taken aback by this photo:
It is the exact tree and exact spot I stood under for the first time in 2016 upon my first visit to Glacier Point. And there was an even more fascinating context for why I had stumbled upon it.
A New York Times slideshow presents images found by a man who, much like myself, was scavenging through photos. This time at a garage sale in Fresno, where he found glass plate negatives he had claimed to be taken by Ansel Adams. I vaguely remembered this news story when it came out. I also remembered seeing a link on the Pillsbury foundation’s site to shots of a Jeffrey Pine atop Sentinel Dome (just above Glacier Point) as evidence of why they believed these were shot by Pillsbury. And here I am looking at a photograph of a spot where I know with some certainty that Pillsbury also stood.
I collect old photos precisely because their context has mostly been worn away... piecing together bits of spaces and lives from minimal amounts of mostly visual clues. The why, when, for who they were taken. If I get a group I can begin to make connections even if they’re guesses.
A couple who loved Central Park and their dog, Otto....
Pen pals across the world…
(On the reverse Katsuyoshi is careful to indicate the exact place the photos were taken.)
But these are mostly fragments. This time I am blessed with info that continues to sift its way in. Discovering fingerprints and stories of iconic Yosemite photographers and inadvertently walking in their footsteps.
photo by Melissa Efrus
In his book “On Trails” Robert Moor cites Keith Basso, a linguistic anthropologist:
First, places were named, often in intricate visual detail (“Water Flows Inward Under a Cottonwood Tree,” “White Rocks Lie Above in a Compact Cluster”). Once named, those places became what Basso called “mnemonic pegs” to which stories-- creation myths, morality tales, ancestral history-- were attached and group identities were formed
Apaches view the past as a well-worn trail (‘intin), once traveled by their ancestors, and still being traveled today. “Beyond the memories of living persons, this path is no longer visible,” wrote Basso. “For this reason, the past must be constructed-- which is to say imagined-- with the aid of historical materials.” Apaches relate this process of re-creation to how one can reconstruct a person’s movements from scattered footprints. Time frames grow vague, and characters are often reduced to archetypes, but the essential elements-- the settings, the lessons, the flora and fauna-- remain highly specific. (“Long ago, right there at that place, there were two beautiful girls…” begins a typical story.) Basso notes: “What matters most to Apaches is where events occurred, not when, and what they serve to reveal about the development and character of Apache social life.”
I have my where, and footprint by footprint I have a tale taking place.
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