Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Yellowstone National Park in 1871 and today
Yellowstone National Park in 1871 and today
After 140 years, the boulders, canyons and geysers of Yellowstone National Park appear to be no worse for wear, according to newly released images.
Photographer William Henry Jackson photographed the Wyoming-based park in 1871, the year before Congress made Yellowstone the first national park in the world.More than a century later, photographer Brad Boner set out to replicate Jacksons black-and-white photographs.
Some of his pictures will be displayed next to Jacksons this summer at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
That is because the geological features of Yellowstone - the rocks and the geysers and the landscape - are still very much the same, he adds.
What has changed is the way people have populated and developed the park in that time, he says, and the photographs do not tell the whole story.
"Yellowstone has changed vastly - in some ways for better, in some ways for the worse," says Mr Quammen. "Those changes mostly involve ecological changes."
Animal populations have prospered, he says, with more wolves in the park now than at the time when Jackson took his camera and headed off on that expedition.
But he thinks the people who now run the park are sensitive to the fact that as visitor numbers increase, the scenic resources are put under strain.
Limits will have to be placed on how many people can visit, he says. Last year, four million people came to Yellowstone.
Mr Boner has been talking about his techniques. He says he walked around the park holding his photos up to the horizon, in order to replicate Jackson.
"The whole point of creating Yellowstone was to give future generations an opportunity to experience these special places," he told the AP news agency.
Things would just "click and fall into place" when he was trying to find the right frame, he says.
"All of a sudden, youre looking at the landscape that is in the photograph that I was holding, that Jackson took. There were definitely times I got goose bumps."
Reporting by Ashley Gold
Available link for download