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

William L. Fox 

Softcover | 19.69 x 1.91 x 24.77 cm | 310 pp

University of New Mexico | 2001 | 9780826322203

Mark Klett has been photographing the American West for decades. 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 L. 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, this book 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 reflects upon the meaning of the landscape at the start of our current millennium.