An online exhibition conceived and produced by photo-eye in honor of the launch of Mark Klett's forty year retrospective book, Seeing Time, published by the University of Texas Press, July 2020.

A selection of photographs from this online exhibition are also on view at photo-eye GALLERY in Santa Fe through September 2020.

"Bill Fox and I had just finished working together on Third View when we agreed to undertake a new collaboration on six American deserts. Bill suggested we go first to Wendover, Nevada, where what was left of a former World War II air base, once the world’s largest, remains on the edge of the Salt Lake desert. We were sponsored as residents in Wendover by the Center for Land Use Interpretation and spent our first weeks exploring the once secret air base, now in ruins. The base was used to train bomber crews, including the ones who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945"
— Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"In 2004 I began making a group of small-scale photographs that I thought of as “time and space equations.” They progressed out of a desire to do a project using film and to explore what I thought film could do better than nascent digital technologies. My thoughts were influenced by earlier work in rephotography and some unresolved questions about the relationship between time and change."
— Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"In the spring of 2007 Byron Wolfe and I considered the possibility of starting a new project. I suggested we take a trip to the Grand Canyon…. We were interested in taking up where the last project had ended, and the national parks seemed to offer opportunities as places of high image density…. We realized after the first week of fieldwork that the possibilities for making new work at the Grand Canyon were even greater than we had expected…. And the instant feedback we could receive by downloading digital images to a laptop offered us greater options while we were still on site, similar to the way the Polaroid film had given us on-site feedback in the past." — Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"In 1963 the gates closed on a massive dam, blocking the Colorado River as it flowed past a seldom-visited scenic wonder called Glen Canyon. The Glen Canyon dam backed up 170 miles of river water along the border of southern Utah and northern Arizona, creating Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States. Glen Canyon itself became submerged by the rising lake waters and eventually disappeared completely, but not before it was photographed by Eliot Porter and featured in a landmark book of color photography, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (Sierra Club, 1963).

Our project began as a request to consider the challenge of working with a subject that we knew would no longer be accessible. Collin Westerbeck, then director of the California Museum of Photography, asked Byron Wolfe, Rebecca Solnit, and me to reprise the team we created for the Yosemite in Time project and collaborate once again in searching for what could be found of Porter’s Glen Canyon."
— Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"Today, most of the Camino del Diablo is on the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range, and the US-Mexico border is a militarized zone constantly patrolled by government agents and crisscrossed by air and ground forces practicing for war. Anti-immigrant politics and talk of a bigger border wall add an occupied feel to a place that already registers a history of violence and surveillance. Camino travelers often hide from detection, whether immigrants or drug smugglers, moving north under the cover of night or the ruggedness of the terrain. A still hostile climate kills many who dare travel in hot weather. Yet the Camino also crosses one of the wildest and most beautiful regions of the Sonoran Desert.

There’s a legacy of human presence on the Camino, sometimes tragedy, left only in traces. Signs of passage remain for centuries in Arizona’s dry climate. It is a route at the compelling intersection of transience, danger, and beauty." — Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"I included the cacti in photographs as soon as I moved to Arizona in 1982. Then sometime around 1987 I started to make a series of what I considered to be saguaro portraits. I would find a cactus that interested me and walk around it, examining all sides. I made photographs of entire plants from a similar distance, showing top, bottom, and arms. The series was originally given the name Desert Citizens." — Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"I gave up making the photographs I had been working on outside of the RSP up to that point, color photographs made from 35 mm film that were formal explorations of ordinary urban scenes. I switched in favor of the black-and-white Polaroid process and found that it could be more personal, and I could include friends, events, and the places I visited. My practice became closer to my life at the time. I saw these photographs as my snapshots, and their departure from the concerns I had about art practice felt very liberating." — Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"These sticks are made from various pieces of wood, metal, and artifacts found while on field trips throughout the West. They are used in a game called the Sunrise Stick Game that’s often played with traveling companions. The game was invented as a way to settle campfire arguments about where the sun would rise in the morning, a subject of interest to landscape photographers." — Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"The idea for this project came from the writer Rebecca Solnit, who had recently finished the research for her book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003). Rebecca proposed a new project to rephotograph Yosemite photographs Muybridge made in 1872. Byron Wolfe and I were just finishing the Third View DVD work, and we agreed to a three-person collaboration.

The project began by locating the sites and rephotographing Muybridge’s photographs in Yosemite National Park. Fieldwork involved the three of us camping together and visiting sites mutually chosen."
— Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

1872 ﹣ 1979 ﹣ 1978 (color)

1873 ﹣ 1978

1873 ﹣ 1978

1872 ﹣ 1978

1872 ﹣ 1978

1868 ﹣ 1978

1872 ﹣ 1979

"This work began when I moved to Arizona in early 1982, and it continued until 2004, around the time Polaroid’s Type 55 film was removed from the market. Initially the series owed its look to the photographs I’d been making of home and friends in Idaho, but the photographs became more focused on the landscapes of the Southwest and the history of issues related to human interaction with the land there."

— Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

"Third View added a third image to the pairs made during the Rephotographic Survey Project. It began exactly twenty years after the first rephotography project and used the same methods to repeat photographs made for the western surveys of the 1860s and 1870s. Photographs for this project continued to be made on film, but otherwise Third View differed from the RSP in the extended use of new technologies." — Mark Klett, from Seeing Time, University of Texas Press, 2020

1878 ﹣ 1978 ﹣ 1988