Mark Klett – författare

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.

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

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.