In the spring of 2007 Byron Wolfe and I considered the possibility of starting a new project.
I suggested we take a trip to the Grand Canyon. It was conveniently located for us both geo-graphically, and there was a huge number of historical images of the canyon that we could mine online. The Yosemite project had expanded the methods we'd been using to rephotograph historical images, and there had been several compelling changes in technology since the end of that project that we wanted to explore. We were interested in taking up where the last project had ended, and the national parks seemed to offer opportunities as places of high image density. Plus, the photographs made in the Grand Canyon were among the most iconic of American land-scapes.

We realized after the first week of fieldwork that the possibilities for making new work at the Grand Canyon were even greater than we had expected. Our tools and research methods had changed in the four years since the Yosemite project had ended. We were using a medium-format digital sensor on a type of digital view camera that could rival the detail of traditional film-based large-format photography. And the instant feedback we could receive by downloading digital images to a laptop offered us greater options while we were still on site, similar to the way the Polaroid film had given us on-site feedback in the past. We even had a portable printer that allowed us to print out photographs in the field. It was a totally different kind of digital photography than what we first employed for Third View ten years earlier. The digital camera we used at the start of the Grand Canyon project had almost twenty times greater resolution than my first digital camera. By the end of three years working at the Grand Canyon, we had yet another digital camera, and the detailed resolution we could capture doubled again.

There was no simple formula for the methods we used at the Grand Canyon, but the rule of thumb was to attempt new ways of working as often as possible. The digital tools available to us seemed to finally match our vision. Technical changes were still happening quickly, and when new devices were introduced such as the Apple iPad, we thought of how we might use them to visualize the canyon in a new way.

Our research into historical images was often done during field trips, after visiting the space first, by searching the web in a hotel lobby or cafeteria on our laptop computers or using our phones. Since the equipment was more portable than in the past we could often visualize the way a piece might come together while we were still on site.

We visited the canyon twice a summer, usually in May or June and again in August, spending a week on each trip. We would travel to both the north and south parts of the canyon, and our work was mostly confined to the rims where almost all of the historical photographs were made.

At first, all views of the canyon looked the same to me. But as we grew to understand the canyon's geography, our knowledge of the features and the ways photographs recorded them improved, and that allowed us to understand how photographs have represented or failed to represent scenes of incredible depth and how they were flattened into two-dimensional planes.