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

Afterimage, July, 2001 by Stephen Longmire

Klett had also contracted the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally what his predecessors did spontaneously, and in doing so he has enriched the historical record with countless ironies. (Not least of them, as Verburg wrote in Second View, was that, "Unlike our predecessors, we did not take what we thought would be appealing shots." [3]) In the context of this oddly Borgesian enterprise, the question naturally arose, what would it be to conceive a photographic survey of the American West today, when the frontier is long closed and none of the original purposes--assessing the land's mineral wealth and its potential for defense and development--can realistically be served, but the consequences of these projects are more or less apparent? As it was for Menard, copying was the path to creation for Klett. The way to mount a latter-day photographic survey of the West that would not simply prove received assumptions about land use (like so much of the New Topographics work against which the RSP chafed) was to copy the classics, word for word, knowing the inflections would be new with the passage of time. Never mind that the nineteenth-century surveys, led by scientists like Clarence King or military men like George Wheeler, were not strictly photographic surveys--they were geographical and geological surveys that took photographers along. The RSP never followed the routes of the original survey parties for long--instead they honed in on the photographers they admired and followed in their footsteps, willfully begging the question of how much agency these individuals had. By repeating views, they established that O'Sullivan in particular was not above twisting his camera dramatically to make natural conditions, like the slant of a hillside, conform to his ideals of wildness. They brought the historical record to life, putting it in the hands of working photographers.

Beginning with some photographs he made at RSP campsites, Klett went on to do what he calls his "personal work," featured in the 1992 collection Revealing Territory, among other publications. He continued using the 4 x 5-inch view camera and Polaroid positive/negative film he and his RSP colleagues fancifully felt approximated the nineteenth-century wet-plate process, since it too must be processed (if not coated) in the field. He also continued working on collaborative surveys, notably the "Water in the West" project and a survey of California's Main Headlands as they passed from military to recreational use. And he continued making occasional rephotographs, interspersed with personal work, like his often reproduced 1986 color panorama of the Grand Canyon, Around Toroweap Point, just before and after sundown, beginning and ending with views used by J.K. Hillers over one hundred years earlier, Grand Canyon, August 17, 1986, a sequence of five photographs tracing a bend in the Colorado River beginning and end ing with rephotographs of nineteenth-century views John Hillers made while surveying for John Wesley Powell.