Provo » When renowned photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange ventured into the southern Utah towns of St. George, Gunlock and Toquerville to produce the photo essay "Three Mormon Towns" for LIFE magazine in 1954, the joint project started with a bang. It ended in something of a whimper with limited exposure.

When Provo-based photographer Mark Hedengren picked up the same trail more than 50 years later, by contrast, he couldn't stop taking pictures.

"It was so much fun I just never stopped," said Hedengren, a 29-year-old graduate of Brigham Young University.

Although widely traveled, and armed with an MFA degree from the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, the professional photographer has made Mormon communities worldwide something of a specialty. Both his exhibition work, and assignments with French news syndicate Sipa Press, for whom he works, reflect a deep fascination with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members.

So when he learned of Adams' and Lange's joint sojourn deep into southern Utah years ago, he couldn't believe he hadn't heard of it before.

"I don't believe my photography's better than theirs. I'm not even in the same league," Hedengren said. "I carried their work in the article around so I could show it to people I was photographing."

As his artist's statement for "Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange's 'Three Mormon Towns' Rephotographed," makes clear, however, retracing their steps was "the closest I'll get to meeting them."

Hedengren's finished exhibition, on display at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library through Oct. 28, offers not just a tantalizing study in past and present developments, but in how the photo essay itself has evolved over time.

The distance between the two exhibitions is also ripe with lessons about competing aesthetic philosophies said James Swensen, instructor of art history in BYU's department of visual arts. Lange approached her subjects with an eye for compassion bordering at times on agenda, as in her iconic photography from the Depression. Adams' emphasis on landscape and the modernist tradition of form translated to a vision without sentiment, Swensen said. Some art historians speculate that the clash of these approaches might have led LIFE editors to shrink the essay, published Aug. 24, 1954, down to only 10 pages. And the work was never exhibited.

"Adams was interested in the idea of pre-visualization, or what an image will look like as a photograph. That motivation was very different from what Lange was trying to do," Swensen said. "Those differences came to the surface."

When the duo descended upon Toquerville, they also had difficulty securing people's permission to be photographed through the local bishop, Swensen said. Thanks to a 1941 Guggenheim grant to study Mormons and other communities thought of as "utopian" at the time, Lange was more familiar with her subject's culture. Adams floundered somewhat, vexed at the prospect of having to talk people into being photographed.

The barrier of the outsider posed no such challenge to Hedengren, who is Mormon. When Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland walked into a St. George restaurant to mingle and shake hands, Hedengren knew at once to have his camera ready. Several of Hedengren's photographs capture people at their most natural moments in church settings, where the individual and community blend into one.

Hedengren said his insider status was a double-edged sword, however. A large part of Swiss photographer Robert Frank's success in photographing his famous collection "The Americans" was possible, Hedengren said, because Frank saw his subjects with foreign eyes.

The fresh tension a new subject affords wasn't always lacking. Hedengren said the differences between more cosmopolitan Mormon life in northern Utah and rural Mormon life in the southern part of the state stand out on their own. Previous work documenting Mormon communities in Europe attuned him to even more contrasts and details.

"Beating the heat during summer is a big driver of social events in southern Utah," he said. "And the families down south are even larger, on average, than Mormon families up north."

A few comments in the visitors' book chide Hedengren for including a photograph of a young woman standing pool-side in a bikini. Far more numerous are compliments for the photograph "Man Cleaning Church," which he shot in Gunlock.

"It captures how Mormons mix spiritual and temporal concerns," wrote one man who strolled through the exhibition.

The same viewer even put to rest Hedengren's initial concerns that he might not be able to make the familiar look new.

"I am accustomed to seeing Mormons in Mormon towns, yet I still feel like I'm getting an outsiders' glimpse to Mormons and their culture."