Mark Klett

Mark Klett’s photographs highlight the expansive landscapes of the American West. Frequently collaborating with photographer Byron Wolfe, Klett has taken on a number of multimedia endeavors that explore the possibilities of photography in the digital age. The duo's Third View project, a geographical survey of the Western United States, featured an interactive map on its website, which pointed to famed sites of landscape photography. The two men revisited and photographed these points of interest so as to allow viewers the experience of seeing the sites not only through the lenses of different photographers but over the course of decades. This theme dealing with the passage of time appears throughout Klett’s work. For his Time Studies series, for example, he achieved sharp images of events unfolding across landscapes by using extra long exposures. “The camera is also capable of describing events that occur too slowly for the eye to see,” Klett told photo-eye Gallery of the project. “Photographs can show us a world that exists virtually unobserved within conventional experience.”

Klett received his BS in geology from St. Lawrence University and his MFA in photography from the Visual Studies Workshop at SUNY Buffalo. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally including at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Museum of the University of Texas in El Paso, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Center for Creative Photography in Tuscon. His work can be found in permanent collections worldwide, among them, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.