Group Project wisdom

from Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers by Mark Klett, Rebecca Solnit, Byron Wolfe (Trinity University Press, 2005)

In the introduction Solnit quotes an e-mail from Klett: "... discussion about the nature of collaboration while driving through the park.  It had to do with accepting uncertainty, with letting the process guide discovery.  This is pretty standard stuff.  But from an interpersonal perspective it was important because we had to establish the premise that we could accept personal vulnerabilities--the right to be wrong, to have ideas that wouldn't work or weren't good, to speculate without the fear of feeling foolish.  We had to agree to work in an environment of mutual support, of mutual success, and to share the responsibility for failure." 

Klett's comments offer wisdom about working with others toward many sorts of goals, in many types of projects.  I think that he was referring directly to the work the three of them undertook, but his comments might also be extended to include the photographers whose work they were remaking as they searched out the locations and timing to re-photograph and then made composite images such as the one below.

Here is one visual outcome of the collaboration, a project of re-photographing in Yosemite.  More can be seen in the book and at this site.

Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, 2002. Four views from “Panorama Rock,” an obscure outcrop off the Panorama Cliff Trail: two rephotographs, a speculation on Muybridge’s missing plate No. 39, and another photograph added to the left.