Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Writer/contact: Nora Wendl, 706/542-0069, nwendl@uga.edu

Acclaimed photographer Mark Klett’s “On Photography, Time, and Change” to open at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art Main Gallery

Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art will present “On Photography, Time, and Change,” an exhibition spanning four bodies of work by acclaimed photographer and visiting artist Mark Klett. The exhibition, in the Main Gallery of the Visual Arts Building on Jackson Street, will include a lecture by Klett on Thursday, Nov. 9, at 5:30 p.m. in the Student Learning Center, room 101. A reception will follow from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Main Gallery.

Widely known for his rephotography of historic American Western sites first visited by early photographic greats Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Weston, Mark Klett’s contribution to “On Photography, Time, and Change” includes panoramic landscapes, multimedia interactive “field recordings,” urban diptychs, and a series of studies measuring time—all work produced in the last five to six years on themes of time, space, and landscape that Klett has developed over his entire career.

In selections from his panoramic series “Yosemite in Time,” Klett and two collaborators explore and connect the wildernesses of Yosemite National Park’s photographic archives and obscure photographic locations with scientific precision. Bringing rephotography—a technique used by geologists and other scientists to study changes in the landscape over time—into the multimedia realm of art, the widely published “Third View” comes into focus. A collaboration with UGA associate professor of art Michael Marshall, “Third View” offers audiences the opportunity to partake in an interactive journey of 109 rephotographed American Western sites (a revisitation of the 1979 Rephotographic Survey Project for which Klett was chief photographer), complete with audio, video and animated walk-arounds.

The effect of time on urban landscapes is given equal consideration in “On Photography, Time, and Change,” and is evident in selections from Klett’s rephotographic diptych series, “After the Ruins,” which pairs contemporary views of San Francisco with archival photographs taken immediately after the city’s devastating earthquake and fires of 1906. Time itself becomes the subject in a fourth series of work termed simply “Time Studies,” in which Klett meters exposures ranging from 10 minutes to two days, recording phenomena that is, as he describes, “difficult to experience as a discreet event.”

Klett has been photographing the intersection of landscapes, cultures and time for 25 years. He is the author of 12 books, including the recently released Third Views, Second Sights (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, and the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission. He is Regents’ Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe.

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