Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

One day in the spring of 2003, my work was featured in a university colloquium with a man who launched an extended ad hominem attack on me, my motives, and my hopefulness. I’d arrived at that hopefulness in the course of pursuing a return project in Yosemite National Park. In 2001, with the artists Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, I’d ventured in to rephotograph Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs there and understand what had changed since he made them in 1872. Our project grew into a broader survey of earlier photographers, modernist as well as Victorian, and of what had and had not changed since their times. The exploration gave me a magnificently complex sense of change as something that does not occur at a predictable rate but varies widely from place to place and entity to entity: some trees were still recognizable more than a century later, some arrangements of small boulders had not moved in all that time, but the Merced River had shifted its bed, forests had devoured meadows, and celebrated old landmarks had vanished.