Seeing Time
Seeing Time
Forty Years of Photographs
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.
My hands-down favorite photobook of 2020 is [Mark Klett's] Seeing Time...It is wonderful to watch his early, already great, work deepen and evolve over 42 years—powered by the three engines of working a lot (and well), thinking a lot (and well), and collaborating a lot (and well) with interesting people, living and dead.
Artist of a singular originality and vision, Klett has designed a deep and dynamic work that captures the space and history of the American West, while evoking notions of time, perception and cultural memory...the images presented here combine to form a body of work that is both vast and deeply personal.
Klett’s visual exploration of landscapes of the American West, which bear the traces of human presence, is a story of interaction between people and place. Rather than an indictment of the impact of humankind on nature, it reveals a multilayered relationship that evokes memories of time and region.
A former geologist turned photographer, Mark Klett is the author of seventeen photographic books, including Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project and Revealing Territory, a collection that examines the way people have experienced and left their presence on the land. His work has been exhibited and published internationally and is held in more than eighty museum collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, and J. Paul Getty Museum. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, among others, and was named photographer of the year by Friends of Photography in 1993. Klett currently serves as Regents’ Professor of Art and Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University.
- Interview with Mark Klett, by Anne Wilkes Tucker
- A Sense of Where You Are: The Making of a New Kind of Landscape Photographer, by Keith F. Davis
- Mark Klett’s Guide to Collaboration, by Rebecca A. Senf
- Plates
- The Rephotographic Survey Project, 1977–1979
- Pre-Arizona, 1979–1981
- Revealing Territory, 1982-2004
- Saguaros, 1987–2007
- Birthday Portraits, 1992–Ongoing
- Third View, 1997–2000
- Yosemite in Time, 2001–2003
- The Half-Life of History, 2001–2007
- Time Studies, 2003–2005
- Reconstructing the View, 2007–2010
- Drowned River, 2011–2016
- El Camino del Diablo, 2013–2015
- Sticks from the Sunrise Stick Game, 2019
- Timeline
- Contributors
