View Finder : Mark Klett, Photography, and the Reinvention of Landscape (2001) by William L. Fox
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Cover Photos: Largest photograph: Timothy O'Sullivan, Crab's Claw Peak, western Nevada, 1867. Collection of the United States Geological Survey; Middle photograph: Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe for Third View, Byron checking his blister, Karnak Ridge, Nevada, 1998; Small photograph: Mark Klett, Artifacts left at Karnak Ridge: Polaroid print, compass, note. 7/9/98. |
Selected Quotes
… we still think of a camera, even if unconsciously, as a miniaturized room wherein we seek the truth. The camera is the vaulted chamber of a judge -- our eye -- which is attempting to discern reality. It is wise to remember however, that the root means “curved,” that light can bend and that our perceptions of reality tend to be refracted through our individual viewpoints. Also bear in mind that the camera “obscures” that which is outside its angle of view. [page 30]
William Henry Fox Talbot … the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, in 1844-46. [page 32]
1851 - Frederick Scott Archer…. invented a process using a sticky liquid called collodion … could fix images on glass plates. Blanquart-Evrard… coating paper with egg whites, producing “albumen paper” [page 32]
Wet-plate glass negatives … exposure times … thirty seconds or so for landscapes [page 33]
The camera will obscure a large part of the world at any moment, given its narrow field of vision, but it also thoroughly reveals its subjects by freezing a moment in time and space for our extended contemplation. [page 37]
Clarence King … What he saw during his exploits, from the glaciers of the Sierra to the crater of Mt. Lassen and the deeply eroded riverbeds of the Southwest, led him to hypothesize that both the gradual forces of nature and its violent upheavals formed the geology he had surveyed. Years later, in 1877, he would present a controversial graduation address at the Sheffield School [of Science at Yale] entitled “Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment.” This was to be a direct challenge to the strictly uniformitarian viewpoint held by many leading scientists, with King proposing an early version of what scientists now refer to as “punctuated equilibria." … a chaotic place where change is inevitable but sometimes violent and unpredictable. … King’s corollary belief, however, even though perhaps only a politically motivated one, that catastrophe was God’s way of kicking evolution into successively higher levels of achievement, would raise an eyebrow. [page 39]
Timothy O’Sullivan… turned that dispassionate gaze, which had served him so well to document and perhaps even survive the horrors of the Civil War, upon a land that Americans considered the most barren and godforsaken in the country, yet one that O’Sullivan found visually inviting [page 40-41]
O’Sullivan descended nine hundred feet down into the mines of Virginia City and made the first underground photographs of miners at work. He lit magnesium ribbons in order to get his exposure -- a somewhat hazardous practice given the known pockets of inflammable gas nearby, but typical of O’Sullivan’s determination to push the boundaries of his medium to its technological limits. He climbed up the five-hundred-foot-high Sand Mountain east of present-day Fallon and made one of the most well-known images of the West ever taken, his wagon and four mules standing patiently in the landscape so barren that it is with actual relieve we see the footprints of the photographer leading from the wagon into the immediate foreground [page 41]
William Henry Jackson … A close friend [of Jackson’s] and fellow expeditionary artist was the painter Thomas Moran, who inculcated in him the romantic creed of the great English painter J. M. W. Turner: what was important was the essence of the reality, and not its literal appearance. Jackson would go so far as to alter his negatives in order to heighten the drama of geological features -- so it would appear not as it was, necessarily, but as he thought it should be. … Science had taken a back seat to scenic manipulation in the supposedly objective chamber of the camera. [page 43]
With O'Sullivan we walk steadily through a landscape that has no pretense to being pretty or romantic, an aesthetic already well established in his Civil War work. When a figure appears in one of his photographs, he is often beneath and dominated by the view, sometimes even partially hidden or hard to find. Furthermore, Clarence King was a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art and proselytized the viewpoint that images of nature made by artists should be free of manipulation. O’Sullivan took his photographs under the direction of the geologist with an eye fixed firmly on the underlying forces and structure of the regions -- whether he was literally crawling underground with miners or climbing obscure ridges to document the unusual fracturing of rocks. … he was not above tilting his camera to isolate the evidence of geological process -- but always seems to be in service of the land itself, and not of a romantic creed. [page 43-44]
There’s a reason that in his own work Klett often deliberately lets his shadow appear in the frame of the photograph, as did O’Sullivan occasionally. It’s his way of saying: Don’t take a photographer’s frame of reference for granted. A photograph might look objective, even scientific, but it might not be the same picture you would make. … As a contemporary photographer, Klett is always aware that our presence in notating the earth changes its reality, a postmodern sensibility that has roots as deep in quantum physics as in the classrooms of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, where Klett received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977. [page 45]
Klett… for my own work I want an empirical basis, not an ideological one, something I can use my intuition with [page 53]
… The longer I work, the more important it is to me to make photographs that tell my story as a participant, and not just an observer of the land. [page 198]
… an intuitive photographer who lets meaning arise out of being in a place and working [page 202]
… there's no judgement here, no advocacy for anything other than paying attention [page 203]
The difference between being a detached documentarian suffering the illusion of objectivity, and an engaged artist falling prey to sentimentality and political correctness, is exactly one of the reasons Klett inserts his shadow into the frame. It's not from a sense of ego to declare himself part of the picture, but to let the viewer acknowledge the presence of the photographer on the scene, then mentally subtract him. It keeps both Klett and the viewer mindful of the fact that there is no such thing as "just a picture," but rather a complex relationship among subject, photographer, viewers, and history. The picture isn't a monologue, but a multilogue. [page 214]
… this idea of serial photography… It's related to how O'Sullivan would take multiple views to investigate a site instead of a singular dominating view attempting to define it. [page 293]
… He's taking a journey of rediscovery, of personal re photography done in the mind, as well as sharing it with us.He's mining the historical past not only for images, ideas, and inspiration, but for his own memories, the deepest mediation of experience we have. [page 293]
Selections from the Bibliography
Armstrong, Carol M. 1998. Scenes in a Library : Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. https://search.worldcat.org/title/45727985
Barthes, Roland, and Geoff Dyer. 2010. Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography. . Translated by Richard Howard. Pbk. ed. New York: Hill and Wang. https://search.worldcat.org/title/671819280
Adams, Robert, Lewis Baltz, Harry M. Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Hamish Fulton, William Garnett, Eliot Porter, Art Sinsabaugh, George A. Tice, and Brett Weston. 1980. Landscape, Theory. Edited by Carol Di Grappa. New York, NY: Lustrum Press. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/7083257
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Picabor, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/3223849
Szarkowski, John, Cleveland Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, J.B. Speed Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Krannert Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Milwaukee Art Center. 1978. Mirrors and Windows : American Photography since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/4496739
