Third View added a third image to the pairs made during the Rephotographic Survey Project. It began exactly twenty years after the first rephotography project and used the same methods to repeat photographs made for the western surveys of the 1860s and 1870s. Photographs for this project continued to be made on film, but otherwise Third View differed from the RSP in the extended use of new technologies.

Like the Rephotographic Survey Project, Third View was a collaboration, but unlike the Rephotographic Survey Project the team for this project traveled and worked together in the field throughout the project’s duration. The participants were graduate students in the photo program at Arizona State University including Byron Wolfe, Kyle Bajakian, Toshi Ueshina, and Michael Marshall. In the second year, the writer William L. (Bill) Fox joined the team and wrote the field notes that were published on the DVD.

The fieldwork took the team to more than 110 sites in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and Idaho. Fieldwork was intentionally experimental.

One incident in 1998 entailed an early attempt to create a bloglike website based on a field-trip journey through Nevada. The team had mixed results in uploading text and photographs made with an early 1.5 megapixel digital camera (my first) via dial-up modems in motel rooms. We carried a carload of tower computers and cathode ray tube monitors into the field as an experiment and discovered that blogging technology at that time was a little premature for our aspirations.

For me the project began as a way to reconnect to my roots in landscape photography and test my understanding of the relationship between time and change. I could not have predicted the course the project eventually took toward its electronic completion, largely due to the intense and fluid work of the collaboration. It did help cement a longer-term working relationship with Byron Wolfe, the designer and programmer of the project’s DVD. Byron and I worked closely together on the disk for several years while preparing the project for publication, and the positive outcomes of that relationship led to more collaborations in projects that followed.