It Doesn't Get Much Grander Than This!

Grand Canyon National Park was established by act of Congress on February 26, 1919.

The Grand Canyon, formed by the rapid torrents of the Colorado River, is considered one of the most astounding natural phenomena in the world. Photographer Mark Klett's five-panel panorama captures the grandeur and majesty of the Grand Canyon. Bracketing his own contemporary views with J. K. Hiller's from the nineteenth century, Klett constructs a seamless continuum from first view to last. Klett uses his hat to mark the landscape. Beyond indicating human scale, the hat adds the photographer and the photograph to a timeline that began with the formation of the rock. The striations of the canyonside recount a geological time of many thousands of years, while Klett's quotation of Hiller's nineteenth-century photographs questions the progress of a century: what is different, how much is the same?

Source: Merry A. Foresta, Stephen Jay Gould, and Karal Ann Marling. Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (Washington, D.C. and Albuquerque, New Mexico: The National Museum of American Art in association with the University of New Mexico Press, 1992).

Pictured: Mark Klett, born 1952 , Around Toroweap Point, just before and after sundown, beginning and ending with views used by J. K. Hillers, over 100 years ago, Grand Canyon,1986, gelatin silver prints, 19 3/16 x 15 15/16 in. each, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Consolidated Natural Gas Company Foundation.