Search results for ""Author Mark Klett""

How exactly has San Francisco's urban landscape changed in the hundred years since the earthquake and cataclysmic firestorms that destroyed three-quarters of the city in 1906? For this provocative rephotography project, bringing past and present into dynamic juxtaposition, renowned photographer Mark Klett has gone to the same locations pictured in forty-five compelling historic photographs taken in the days following the 1906 earthquake and fires and precisely duplicated each photograph's vantage point. The result is an elegant and powerful comparison that challenges our preconceptions about time, history, and culture. 'I think the pictures ask us to become aware of the extraordinary qualities of our own distinct moment in time. But it is a realization that a particular future is not guaranteed by the flow of time in any given direction.' So says Mark Klett discussing this multilayered project in an illuminating interview included in this lavishly produced volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. "After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006" features a vivid essay by noted environmental historian Philip Fradkin on the events surrounding and following the 1906 earthquake, which he describes as 'the equivalent of an intensive, three-day bombing raid, complete with many tons of dynamite that acted as incendiary devices.' A lyrical essay by acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit considers the meaning of ruins, resurrection, and the evolving geography and history of San Francisco.

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Much of Mark Klett's (born 1952) work as a photographer has entailed conversations with historical images. For this project, Klett worked only with the account of a young mining engineer named Raphael Pumpelly who wrote of his perilous journey through Arizona and Mexico in 1861 on the lawless Camino del Diablo or "road of the devil." More than 150 years later, Klett traversed the same route, making photographs in response to Pumpelly's words. Today, most of the Camino is located on the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range and the border is a militarized zone patrolled by government agents and crisscrossed by air and ground forces practicing for war. Unable to trace the engineer's exact steps, Klett created images that are not literal references to specific places or events; rather, he sought to produce a more poetic narrative of their shared experience of the Arizona desert.

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There is a twisted steel dome in Hiroshima that stands as a grim reminder of the city's destruction by the first atomic bomb. Halfway around the globe, on the border of Utah and Nevada, stands another ruin. The site that housed the bomber that carried “Little Boy,” Wendover Army Air Base, now crumbles from neglect. The stories and relics of Wendover describe more than just the past; they point to a historic cycle, a present increasingly filled with new threats of devastating nuclear and chemical warfare. For this book, American photographer Mark Klett (born 1952) has teamed up with William L. Fox, a celebrated science and art writer whose work focuses on human cognition and memory. Together, the two have created a fascinating visual and textual portrait of Wendover Army Air Base, examining the experience of memory in relation to the great tragedy of America's atomic age.

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This book blends personal observations on Yosemite with reflections on photography and aesthetics, tourism and public life, and the histories of environmental and social politics. Rebecca Solnit's linked essays are interwoven with stunning images old and new: the book combines classic pictures by Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston with painstakingly re-photographed versions to show the startling changes wrought over time -- by nature and humankind. Yosemite in Time paints a multifaceted portrait of a natural treasure that reflects the most compelling issues of our time.

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An artist of singular originality and vision, award-winning landscape photographer Mark Klett has built a profound and dynamic career that captures the space and history of the American West while evoking notions of time, perception, and cultural memory. His practice is grounded in both artistic inquiry and the evolution of photographic technologies, reflecting a constellation of ideas that blend science with poetry. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Klett has advanced a new notion of landscape photography that reframes our sense of what pictures of the land mean.Seeing Time is the first retrospective of Klett’s career. It presents selected photographs from thirteen different projects, some never before seen. The book showcases work from individual and collaborative projects alongside texts by distinguished curators who examine the ideas behind Klett’s practice, its historical context, and his collaborative processes. From his rephotographic surveys, which pair conceptual art with questions about how lands change through human intervention, to the series of portraits with his eldest daughter on their shared birthday, the images presented here combine to form a body of work at once expansive and richly personal.

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Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon for their most recent project, "Reconstructing the View". The team's landscape photographs are based on the practice of rephotography, in which they identify sites of historic photographs and make new photographs of those precise locations. Klett and Wolfe referenced a wealth of images of the canyon, ranging from historical photographs and drawings by William Bell and William Henry Holmes, to well-known artworks by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, and from souvenir postcards to contemporary digital images drawn from Flickr. The pair then employed digital postproduction methods to bring the original images into dialogue with their own. The result is this stunning volume, illustrated with a wealth of full-color illustrations that attest to the role photographers - both anonymous and great - have played in picturing American places. Rebecca Senf's compelling essay traces the photographers' process and methodology, conveying the complexity of their collaboration. Stephen J. Pyne provides a conceptual framework for understanding the history of the canyon, offering an overview of its discovery by Europeans and its subsequent treatment in writing, photography, and graphic arts.

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A stunning combination of landscape photography and thematic essays exploring how the concept of wilderness has evolved over time Our ideas of wilderness have evolved dramatically over the past one hundred and fifty years, from a view of wild country as an inviolable “place apart” to one that exists only within the matrix of human activity. This shift in understanding has provoked complicated questions about the importance of the wild in American environmentalism, as well as new aesthetic expectations as we reframe the wilderness as (to some degree) a human creation. Wild Visions is distinctive in its union of landscape photography and environmental thought, a merging of short, thematic essays with a striking visual narrative. Often, the wild is viewed in binary terms: either revered as sacred and ecologically pure or dismissed as spoiled by human activities. This book portrays wilderness instead as an evolving gamut of understandings, a collage of views and ideas that is still in process.

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