View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape

Mark Klett has been photographing the American West for nearly twenty-five years. He directed the Rephotographic Survey Project in the late 1970s, which located and rephotographed the sites of images made by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, and other photographers surveying the West in the late nineteenth century. Klett has also published several books of his own work.

Using his travels in the Nevada desert with Mark Klett and his current rephotographic team as the starting point, William Fox offers here an examination of the history of photography in the American West and of Klett’s role in documenting the landscape. Like the story of photography itself, this is a multilayered narrative. Part historical overview, part travel journal, part biographical study of Klett, View Finder explores the evolution of our view of the land from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Fox looks at the legacy left by the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Robert Adams. And in focusing on the work of Mark Klett in the last quarter century, William Fox reflects upon the meaning of the landscape at the beginning of the millennium. Because Klett’s work has been so closely connected to the great photographic surveys of the 1870s, and because he has been so influential to a new generation of photographers, his is the ideal viewpoint from which to me! asure our changing approach to the American space.