NetNews

A project by Mark Klett '74, regents professor of art at Arizona State University, was the subject of a story in the Science section of The New York Times September 3.

Klett is working with author Rebecca Solnit and and Byron Wolfe, an assistant professor of communication design at California State University at Chico, to re-photograph rephotographing some of the great landscape photographs of the 19th and 20th centuries, "photographs that were influenced by the idea of the wild and themselves helped form it," according to the article. The collaborators expect to publish a book based on the project in 2005.

Klett started the Rephotographic Survey Project in the late 1970's, taking photographs of sites first pictured as part of a government survey in the 19th century. Twenty years later, he joined with Wolfe in a return to those survey sites, and the two produced a book titled Third View: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West.

The article, by James Gorman, included photographs of and by Klett, as well as this passage:

"Photography, Mr. Klett said, tells stories. And the story of humanity-free nature was a very appealing one. Even when photographers reacted against it by showing ugliness that more romantic photographers had overlooked — what Ms. Solnit calls 'bulldozers in paradise' — the message was still the same, said Mr. Klett. Nature is good. People are bad."

Klett earned his degree from St. Lawrence in geology, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from SUNY Buffalo. At St. Lawrence, he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, Omicron Delta Kappa leadership honorary and Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. His work has been exhibited in the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery on campus.

Posted: September 3, 2003