Mark Klett

An artist of singular originality and vision, award-winning landscape photographer Mark Klett has built a profound and dynamic career that captures the space and history of the American West while evoking notions of time, perception, and cultural memory. His practice is grounded in both artistic inquiry and the evolution of photographic technologies, reflecting a constellation of ideas that blend science with poetry. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Klett has advanced a new notion of landscape photography that reframes our sense of what pictures of the land mean.Seeing Time is the first retrospective of Klett’s career. It presents selected photographs from thirteen different projects, some never before seen. The book showcases work from individual and collaborative projects alongside texts by distinguished curators who examine the ideas behind Klett’s practice, its historical context, and his collaborative processes. From his rephotographic surveys, which pair conceptual art with questions about how lands change through human intervention, to the series of portraits with his eldest daughter on their shared birthday, the images presented here combine to form a body of work at once expansive and richly personal.

A stunning combination of landscape photography and thematic essays exploring how the concept of wilderness has evolved over time Our ideas of wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable “place apart” to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation. Wild Visions is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.

The impact of our industrialized culture on nature - including the exploitation of natural resources, global warming, and climate change - is one of the most crucial and urgent issues of our times. Environmental centers have developed within several scientific disciplines with a common global interest - trying to secure the future of our existence in the world as we know it. The book Broken sets out to investigate environmental change and explore our relation to nature. It also follows in the photographic tradition of raising awareness and supporting policymakers, politicians, researchers, environmentalists, and activists. Featuring texts by seminal environmental photographers and theorists, the book Broken re-evaluates early environmental photography and investigates new ways of experiencing and visualizing landscapes in an interdisciplinary context.

This book blends personal observations on Yosemite with reflections on photography and aesthetics, tourism and public life, and the histories of environmental and social politics. Rebecca Solnit's linked essays are interwoven with stunning images old and new: the book combines classic pictures by Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston with painstakingly re-photographed versions to show the startling changes wrought over time -- by nature and humankind. Yosemite in Time paints a multifaceted portrait of a natural treasure that reflects the most compelling issues of our time.

Includes bonus interactive DVD. In the 19th century the great expeditionary photographers William Henry Jackson, T H O'Sullivan, and William Bell first photographed American western landscapes for the geological and geographical surveys. Mark Klett, Chief photographer of the Rephotographic Survey Project, revisited and rephotographed these 19th-century sites during the late 1970s, presenting 120 pairs of photographs separated by a century of change. Two decades later, Klett organised a new survey team to rephotograph 110 sites. This book presents forty-three pairings from the third survey, documenting two periods of geologic and environmental changes while exploring changing human perceptions of landscape. Published in association with the Center for American Places

It is the only absolute desert in North America, a four-hundred-square-mile dry lake bed so desolate that nothing ever grows there. Vast and featureless, Nevada's Black Rock Desert defies visual measurement much to the consternation of off-roaders who venture out onto this playa only to run out of gas before reaching the other side. It is the largest flat area on the continent, where the sound barrier was broken in a car. And it is a place of total silence not even birds or insects live here except when thousands of humans congregate for the Burning Man Festival on Labor Day weekend. Writer and poet William Fox has demonstrated his familiarity with the Great Basin in such respected books as Mapping the Empty, just as Mark Klett has been documenting the landscape of the American West in his acclaimed photographic studies. Now these accomplished artists turn their combined talents to an appreciation of this desolate corner of North America, where the only change in scenery comes with the shifting pattern of cracks in the earth after seasonal rains. The Black Rock Desert is a philosophical and visual meditation on an extraordinary place virtually devoid of the usual physical features one relies on for orientation and comfort. It invites readers to consider how the mind responds to a place so empty that it's both physically overpowering and psychically disorienting. Klett's photographs are austere yet innovative, admitting the vastness of the desert yet never letting us forget that traces of human passage and perception are ubiquitous. Fox's contemplative essays bring us news of both the natural desert and its cultural occupation, from the explorations of John C. Fremont to the exaltations of Burning Man. Together, Fox and Klett have forged an introspective guide to a place so daunting that few dare to venture there alone. For anyone seeking to understand how and why we perceive deserts the way we do, their book charts the rugged intersection of the American landscape and the human spirit.