In 1963, water began rising behind Glen Canyon Dam, and 170 miles of the Colorado River vanished as the riverbed and surrounding canyons filled. The Sierra Club joined with photographer Eliot Porter to document what would be lost, publishing The Place No One Knew in 1963 as a political statement about the dam’s costs. Decades later, the reservoir began to shrink, and the river reappeared at its upper end. Photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, with writer Rebecca Solnit, spent five years exploring Glen Canyon as the water withdrew, a reversal inseparable from the larger disruptions of climate change.
Drowned River is structured as a dialogue with Porter’s landmark. Klett and Wolfe deliberately retraced the physical locations where he had made his photographs, many of them now submerged; their images confront the same ground from a shifted vantage. Solnit’s accompanying text draws on the trio’s explorations and archival research, meditating on the place’s histories and on the contradiction she names as the madness of the past and the terror of the future, set against beautiful light and majestic space. An introduction by Michael Brune frames the project.
The book’s stakes are historical as well as environmental. It measures a political and ecological battle across more than half a century and registers the strange character of the river’s return, which arrives as part of a broader crisis rather than a simple correction. Where Porter’s book was an act of witness against drowning, this one asks what it means to look again when the terms have changed, to photograph a place neither preserved nor wholly lost, and to reckon with the understanding and responsibility that follow. Photography here describes beauty and trouble at once.
For collectors, the project’s interest lies in its specific method: two photographers known for long-term, place-based work returning to a predecessor’s exact sites, in sustained conversation with a writer whose essays carry historical and moral weight. Radius Books presents it as a 212-page hardcover with 80 images, measuring 11.25 by 13 inches. The archival interlocutor, the five-year collaboration, and the climate subject give the volume its particular standing on the shelf.
