Mark Klett (born September 9, 1952, in Albany, New York) is an American photographer whose work has reshaped the relationship between photography, time, and the American landscape. Trained as a geologist before turning to art, he brings scientific attentiveness to images that remain poetic and conceptually layered. For more than five decades, his practice has connected landscape photography with environmental history, cultural geography, and the question of how a place changes—and how it is seen again.

Klett’s visual language grew from geological fieldwork, where he learned to read the earth’s surface as a record of transformation. Beginning to photograph in the late 1970s, he developed a method based on serial revisiting, systematic comparison, and rephotography. Instead of pursuing pristine or sublime scenery, he often concentrates on the everyday West: highways, vacant lots, industrial margins, and altered terrain. By returning to the same viewpoints and placing past and present into relation, sometimes through archival images used as templates, he makes time itself a visible subject.

His best-known early undertaking is the Rephotographic Survey Project, begun in 1977, in which Klett and colleagues rephotographed the viewpoints of nineteenth-century survey photographers including William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. The results appeared in books such as *Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project* (1984) and *Third Views, Second Sights* (2004), revealing both dramatic transformation and continuity across the Western landscape. Later collaborations extend this inquiry, including the 2015 book *Saguaro: The Desert Blooms at Night*, made with co-authors, and the 2023–2024 expeditions with writer William L. Fox that led to *Remembering the Future* (2026). There, Klett’s photographs meet Fox’s writing on perception, memory, and future imaginaries.

Klett’s significance also lies in his influence as an educator and collaborator. He has been a professor at Arizona State University since 1982, mentoring photographers and challenging the boundaries of landscape studies. His work is held by major collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Center for Creative Photography, whose archive he helped shape. Exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art and other venues have reinforced his reputation, while his books and collaborations have helped define landscape photography as temporal, process-based, and embedded in cultural and environmental histories.

For photobook collectors, Klett’s publications are compelling objects as well as investigations. Archival and contemporary images are often arranged in sequences that make readers move back and forth across time, with design, printing, paper, and image-text relations carrying part of the argument. *Second View* remains a landmark of documentary rephotography, while *Third Views, Second Sights* expands the form through gatefolds and reflective texts. *Remembering the Future* brings field research, photography, and writing together as a collaborative object. Collectors interested in landscape, history, and conceptual art will find a rich body of work that rewards close looking; *Third Views*, with its extensive methodological documentation, is a useful entry point and is widely available.

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