Another Look At The West - View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape - Albuquerque - Review

Afterimage, July, 2001 by Stephen Longmire

View Finder: Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape by William L. Fox

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001 310 pp./$59.95 (hb), $29.95 (sb)

We now view landscape photographs, both past and present, much like the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave. They are artifacts of what we think we know about the land, and how we have come to know it.

Mark Klett [1]

On the strength of his first published body of photographs, Mark Klett could easily have passed for a conceptual artist. The cool, impersonal diptychs of the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP)--on which Klett collaborated with Ellen Manchester, JoAnn Verburg, Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus--paired classic nineteenth-century survey photographs of the American West with contemporary views from precisely the same vantage points, which they painstakingly triangulated in space just over a century later, between 1977 and 1979, as if doing so might allow them to reinhabit a nineteenth-century point of view. This made the RSP pairs exact contemporaries, according to the inexorable logic of the art world, to Sherrie Levine's "ghosts"--the wry rephotographs of "masterpieces" of modernist photography by the likes of Walker Evans and Edward Weston that she offered for sale under her own name. Artistic originality was at an all-time low--or high--value, depending on one's point of view. Levine maintained that her appropri ated copies sucked some of the over-inflated value out of their "originals--a category photography, the democratic art, was not supposed to perpetuate. (In printmaker's terms, a ghost is the uninked afterimage struck from a used plate, bleeding it dry.) Nevertheless, in what was perhaps her supreme joke, she placed a hefty price on her own "originality."

In a positivist gesture uncharacteristic of the time, the RSP rephotographed the sites of the original survey photographs, not just the prints--though they did that too. In their 1984 publication, Second View, and in the paired prints they exhibited, a rephotograph of the first view always accompanied the second, which functioned as an equivocal punch line, revealing how the site looked now. The RSP photographers took copy photographs of the "originals" that were their models, most frequently made by William Henry Jackson or--their special favorite--Timothy O'Sullivan, into the field to help them locate vantage points; theirs was also an investigation of photographic history, in the context of the history of the land. But whereas Levine endeavored to demonstrate the claustrophobic effects of a male-dominated photographic history characterized by endless replications of established masterpieces and no opportunity for new visions except in the guise of further reproductions, the RSP effectively showed that pho tographic history existed in real time on the ground, as well as on paper and in our minds. All this at a time when the art value of the "documentary" survey photographs, made on government and railroad sponsored exhibitions to determine the character and potential of America's newly acquired western territory just after the Civil War, was being hotly debated, as they made their way into art museums and into the work of young landscape photographers.

But perhaps the greatest conceptual achievement of the RSP, with their seemingly affectless pairs of images, was to create stereo "photographs" in the fourth dimension, their exposure time a virtual century. The real interest of these pairs is typically the space in-between, where all the changes occurred, or failed to. Are the housing developments and highways that appear, and the mines that occasionally disappear, developments or depredations? From the point of view of a century, the distinction begins to dissolve. Sometimes the absence of change is most salient. On isolated mountainsides the positions of individual rocks can be compared across what is, after all, only a blink in geologic time.

In one of his most deftly tongue-in-cheek tales, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges tells of "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," the twentieth-century Symbolist poet whose magnum opus consisted in the precise recreation, in flawless seventeenth-century Spanish, of select chapters from Miguel de Cervantes's classic novel, Don Quixote. "He did not want to compose another Don Quixote--which would be easy--but the Don Quixote." [2] This was not to be a matter of copying, either. "His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide--word for word and line for line--with those of Miguel de Cervantes." Needless to say, he did not bother to reread the "original" first--that would be child's play. His goal, rather, was to discover whether a seventeenth-century literary masterpiece could be written in the twentieth century. Or, in Menard's own words, "I have contracted the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work." Because of the irony of this circumstance, Borges's narrator in sists, "The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer." Indeed, he goes so far as to venture, "I often imagine that he finished and that I am reading Don Quixote--the entire work--as if Menard had conceived it."