Photographers

Mark Klett (born September 9, 1952, in Albany, New York) is an internationally renowned American landscape photographer, author, and pioneering conceptual archivist who completely revolutionized the relationship between time, change, and space in lens-based media. Klett originally studied earth sciences, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Geology from St. Lawrence University in 1974. He immediately applied his skills as a field assistant and staff photographer for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Denver. This immersion in rugged terrains and historic mappings inspired him to study photography under the legendary Nathan Lyons at the State University of New York, Buffalo, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts from the Visual Studies Workshop in 1977. Rather than treating landscape as an idealized, untouched wilderness, Klett synthesized his rigorous scientific background with a critical artistic eye, viewing history and human activity as permanent, inseparable elements of the changing natural topography.

Klett achieved monumental critical acclaim by conceiving and initiating the “Rephotographic Survey Project” (RSP) in 1977 alongside Ellen Manchester and Jo Ann Verburg. Over years of grueling fieldwork, the project systematically retraced and rephotographed the exact locations captured by legendary 19th-century geological survey photographers like Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Alexander Gardner. By pairing his sharp modern frames with historic archive prints under strict conditions of perspective, time of day, and season, Klett pioneered the methodology of “rephotography”—turning landscape imagery into a conceptual dialogue on ecological shift and human interaction. He later expanded this approach through successive monumental surveys, including the “Third View Project” (1997–2000) and collaborative landscape studies across Yosemite and the Grand Canyon alongside artist Byron Wolfe. His continuous practice extended into the mid-2020s, culminating in his definitive 2026 monograph “Remember the Future: Nuclear Testing, Rising Seas, and The Marshall Islands,” which investigated post-WWII radioactive legacies exacerbated by climate change.

Beyond his immense documentary and field-based outputs, Klett has served as an institutional titan of American photographic education. Joining Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, he was named a prestigious Regents Professor in 2001 and shaped decades of emerging artists before transitioning to Regents’ Professor Emeritus. His prolific output across five decades includes authoring and co-authoring nineteen critically acclaimed books, including his definitive retrospective “Seeing Time: Forty Years of Photographs” (2020). Klett is the recipient of prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His master prints are permanently curated in over eighty premier institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).