Mark Klett: Saguaros

I think of “social geography” as a term to describe my photographic work and methodology…The photographs that I produce question traditional and clichéd notions of landscape, our place within it, and the collective roles and responsibilities in how and why we shape it the way we do.

— Victoria Sambunaris

Her first book in over ten years, Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape shares the nuance and majesty of the artist’s practice in a large-scale book format. Each year, Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape. Equipped with a 5×7-inch field camera, film, a video camera, and research material, she crosses the country alone by car for several months. Her large-scale photographs capture the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions.

Part of her ongoing, twenty-year series Taxonomy of a Landscape, this book encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts. This title follows her first book with Radius, Taxonomy of a Landscape.

Browse upcoming events with the artist here.

In sonora, scott b. davis uses combinations of in-camera palladium paper negatives and traditional film-based platinum/palladium prints. The images explore the boundaries of visibility in the darkness and overwhelming light of the Sonoran Desert, creating pictures of landscapes that are both literal and abstract. The light and space found in the open desert are felt in these uniquely rendered images comprised of diptychs, triptychs, and occasional works that include as many as ten or twelve unique images in a series.

By using exposure to intense UV light, Davis has pioneered a process that captures images invisible to the naked eye, creating prints rich in contrast to push the boundaries of the visible spectrum and the perceptual limits of human vision. His prints invite closer, deeper looking at landscapes that seem familiar to us in the daylight but evolve into something altogether different when rendered as abstract records of place. The aim is not to represent the desert as we think we know it, but to evoke an intimate connection with the desert through new perspectives.

Learn more about the accompanying limited edition HERE.

He captures the spirit of the explorer’s dark, wide-eyed vision with a critical distance.

— Jordan G. Teicher, Photograph Magazine

Much of Mark Klett’s work as a photographer has centered on a conversation with historical images. For this project, Klett worked only with the account of a young mining engineer named Raphael Pumpelly, who wrote of his journey through Arizona and Mexico in 1861 on the Camino del Diablo or “the road of the devil.” Pumpelly found the territory lawless and filled with danger. Mexican laborers working in the silver mines south of Tucson were perpetually killing their Anglo bosses, and the authorities were virtually non-existent. The Apache led constant raids and ambushes. Pumpelly escaped death several times, often by a matter of minutes. Traveling 130 miles of open desert, he proceeded with both apprehension of the dangers at hand, and appreciation of the natural beauty that surrounded him.

152 years later, Klett traversed the same route, making photographs in response to Pumpelly’s words. 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 to their shared experience of the Arizona desert, along the common route that connects the two through time.

Today, most of the Camino is located on the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range and the border is a militarized zone constantly patrolled by government agents and crisscrossed by air and ground forces practicing for war. Camino travelers often hide from detection, be they immigrants or drug smugglers moving North under the cover of night or the ruggedness of the terrain. Indian reservations create boundaries and mark other cultural divides. A hostile climate kills many who dare travel in hot weather and people die each year on the Camino, most from exposure. Yet the Camino also crosses one of the most beautiful and still wild regions of the Sonoran Desert.

Limited edition of this book available HERE

Mr. Klett’s artful and striking photographs often parse the most minute details: a broken windowpane, a bent nail, .50-caliber bullets found at the machine-gun range. These fragments stand in for Wendover, just as the base stands in for the birth of nuclear destruction.

— Dana Jennnings, The New York Times 

In Hiroshima, Japan, a twisted steel dome is grim reminder of a city destroyed by the first atomic bomb used in warfare. It is a history no one dares to forget. Halfway around the globe in the Utah/Nevada border stands another ruin, the airplane hangar inside of which the bomber that carried the Hiroshima bomb was readied for its mission.

Wendover Airbase, once the world’s largest, now crumbles from neglect. The stories and relics at Wendover describe more than the past, they also point to a historic cycle; to a present filled with new apprehensions that carry the potential for a chilling future.

Artist Mark Klett, known for his ongoing exploration of landscape, history and the passage of time through the medium of photography, and William L. Fox, a celebrated science and art writer whose work has focused on human cognition and memory, team up to create a fascinating visual and verbal multi-layered portrait of Wendover Airbase and the experience of memory in relation to the use of the atomic bomb by the American military in World War II.