Details from the view at Point Sublime on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, based on the panoramic drawing by William Holmes (1882).,

2007

Details from the view at Point Sublime takes as its starting point a meticulous panoramic drawing of the Grand Canyon made in 1882 by William Henry (W. H.) Holmes (1846– 1933). As part of their project to revisit sites of historic depictions of the American West, Klett and Wolfe traveled to Point Sublime, taking hundreds of photographs there. They then overlaid their images onto an enlarged reproduction of Holmes’s drawing, accentuating how its distortion of the scale of geological features simulates the experience of an encompassing vista. By recording ephemeral events such as an impending storm, the circling of a hawk, and the shifting light on the rocks as the sun moved across the sky, Klett and Wolfe’s photographs imbue a historical document with a sense of the passage of time.