ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mark Klett (1952 – ) is an American photographer and St. Lawrence University alumnus who is “making new works that respond to historic images; creating projects that explore relationships between time, change and perception; and exploring the language of photographic media through technology”(“Bio“). The majority of his work focuses on landscapes in the American West and evaluates human interaction with them by composing frames with human subjects or manmade objects in some proximity to a landscape. A recurring theme of his work is re-photography, in which he and collaborators combine various historic or modern images of famous natural landscapes, such as the Grand Canyon, with their own photographs of the same space, blending them together to create a continual landscape. It is in technical innovations such as these, creating comparisons of differing timelines, that Klett’s originality and artistic sense come through. Keith F. Davis notes in his essay “A Sense Where You Are: The Making of a New Kind of Landscape Photographer,” “no other creative photographer has done more than Klett to explore and expand our sense of what pictures of the land mean. This achievement centers on Klett’s work as an artist but includes his vital roles as teacher and project organizer.” (Seeing Time).

Klett was born in Albany, New York, to his father, a WWII Army flight instructor, and his mother, who enjoyed ceramics and photography. He studied geology at St. Lawrence University, where he worked in the dark room and developed an interest in photography. Klett graduated from SLU in 1974. He worked as a staff photographer for the U.S. Geological Survey and in 1977 he studied under photographer Nathan Lyons, completing the MFA program at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. At this time, he began “The Rephotographic Survey Project,” which would expand over his career.  

The work that he has produced since the 1970s is arguably some of the most important American landscape photography of the last forty years. “Klett’s photographs are at once empirical and conceptual, descriptive and suggestive. They deliberately blur the line between the personal and the cultural, present and past, fact and interpretation. In their distinctive range and diversity, they are about a larger notion of interconnectivity” (Davis in Seeing Time). And, while his photographic work is a great feat alone, Klett has also worked outside of this medium, experimenting with creating sticks out of artifacts he found on trips out West in the ongoing series Sticks from the Sunrise Stick Game.

Klett is the author or co-author of over fifteen books, and his photographs have been exhibited and published internationally. His work is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. He is currently a Regents’ Professor at the University of Arizona, Tempe, where he teaches classes in landscape photography, photographic practice for artists, and digital printing and technology.

– Research and writing by Eva Yeo, SLU Class of 2023

Notes

“Bio.” MARK KLETT. Accessed February 14, 2023. http://www.markklettphotography.com/bio. 

Klett, Mark. Seeing Time. Forty Years of Photographs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020.

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