A Return Visit

SAT, 2/5

Take a trip through the West — and the past — today when Mark Klett and Kyle Bajakian, two of the people responsible for Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West, discuss the project that resulted in their stunning book. Klett, who’s on the faculty at Arizona State University, created a second view of the West more than two decades ago, when he traveled eight states in the late ’70s, finding and then repeating early frontier photographs. “We were taking a fresh look at historic places by making a new view from the old,” he writes in his foreword to Third Views, “and it was interesting work. It was also tedious, demanding and time-consuming, so after visiting more than 120 sites, we’d had enough. I remember thinking, someone may do this work again someday, but thankfully it won’t be me.”

Wrong. Two decades later, Klett returned to these sites for Third Views, this time with photography graduate students like Bajakian along to help out. And there was plenty to do, since Klett wasn’t simply shooting from the same spots where he’d stood a generation before — and where pioneering photographers had stood over a century before that. “We’d go to a location, make the ‘rephotograph,’ and that was sort of the launching point, the springboard, to then explore the area to collect stories,” says Klett, who’s now based in Boulder. “I think one of the most surprising things that I discovered was how powerful individual stories are in informing our perception of the changing landscape. We uncovered these stories through oral histories, video, collecting artifacts — what we called ‘alternate images.'”

Those images are collected on a DVD included with the book that shows the sights and sounds of the West as it was more than a century ago, as it was two decades ago, and as it is today. The trip begins at 2 p.m. at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 1628 16th Street; for information, call 303-436-1070. — Patricia Calhoun

All-Star Watch
Scalpers stand ready to help — for a price.

Looking to sink your behind into a Pepsi Center seat at the 2005 NBA All-Star Game? Don’t worry about anything getting in the way: After shelling out for the right to sit there, your wallet ought to be as thin as Kobe’s chance of escaping boos here.

An employee of the Ticket Firm in Greenwood Village estimates that a single All-Star ticket will cost between $500 and $750. That won’t put you near the court, though: Lower-level seats are strictly for the National Basketball Association suits and special company (read: Ludacris et al.). So unless your rhyme skillz are, as the kids like to say, phat, count on paying between $1,500 and $3,500 to a scalper to hang with the hip-hopperati. True ballers, take note: A twenty-person suite for all three days goes for $63,700. And as the game approaches, prices are sure to soar. Anyone want to go halvesies? — Adam Cayton-Holland