Fiona Morgan, News Editor
Upon entering the Bistro, students may notice mashups of landscape photos on the walls of the Blue Gallery on their left. The exhibit is “Stories in the Landscape” by visiting professor Byron Wolfe, the program director of photography at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He spoke about the exhibit in Jameson Recital Hall on Nov. 6 as part of Asbury’s Artist Series.
The exhibit features a blend of old pictures and drawings of the Grand Canyon and Wolfe’s pictures over the same views. Most of the photos he used are by Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer from the late 1800s famous for photographing landscapes in the American West. Wolfe teamed up with photographer Mark Klett in 2007 to go back to the same spots Muybridge photographed and see how the landscapes looked over 100 years later.
“It was as simple as thinking, ‘I wonder what happened to this place since the last time this picture was made,’” said Wolfe. “It was just a really interesting idea for us to think about change over time and to think about standing where Muybridge stood.” Wolfe and Klett published a book in 2012 called “Reconstructing the View,” featuring Muybridge’s photographs overlaid with their own.
At the Artist Series event, Wolfe explained how Muybridge made his photographs using glass plates. While looking through Muybridge’s old photos, Wolfe realized that some features of nature were artificial. Muybridge added fake rocks, clouds and even volcanoes. Light and shadows on some rocks came from different directions than the rest, and Wolfe found separate scenes in the same photo albums that had identical clouds in their skies.
The glass plates Muybridge used were the most sensitive to blue light, so blue was rendered as blank space in a photograph. In old photos, skies are typically overexposed or empty. So Muybridge took separate photographs of clouds which had better exposure and manually combined them, a process known as compositing.
Wolfe went on to discuss the ethics of adding things to photos, such as how Snapchat released a feature in 2017 allowing users to change the sky in their photos. Wolfe rationalized that photographs are as much an art as anything. “Muybridge put in one of his books that these were illustrated by Muybridge; they weren’t photographed by Muybridge,” said Wolfe.
“I came to see these highly reworked images as being as truthful as any other photograph I had ever seen,” said Wolfe. “It made me realize that truth in photography is not a thing. A truth is not a thing you can give somebody. … It’s part of a social transaction.”
Currently, Wolfe’s exhibit is one of three in the Z.T. Johnson galleries. His will be up until Nov. 30, while students Hannah Nozell and Karly Taylor are showing their senior exhibitions until Nov. 16.
