Mark Klett
Four views from four times and one shoreline, Lake Tenaya. Left to right: Eadweard Muybridge, 1872; Ansel Adams, c. 1942; Edward Weston, 1937. Back Panels: Swatting high-country mosquitoes, 2002.
- Four views from four times and one shoreline, Lake Tenaya. Left to right: Eadweard Muybridge, 1872; Ansel Adams, c. 1942; Edward Weston, 1937. Back Panels: Swatting high-country mosquitoes, 2002.
Frame (outer): 29 1/8 × 79 × 2 1/2 in. (74 × 200.7 × 6.4 cm)
Explore Further
Originally trained as a geologist, Mark Klett is one of the preeminent contemporary photographers of the American West. Working in collaboration, he and his student, Byron Wolfe, spent three years trekking through Yosemite National Park, joined by the writer Rebecca Solnit. They followed in the footsteps of photographers who had created iconic images of the park across history, seeking visual traces of history that might highlight the way visitors’ experiences and expectations of nature have changed over time. Klett and Wolfe quickly realized that, regardless of Yosemite’s more than 760,000 acres, photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston had made similar photographs decades apart, from locations only yards away from each other.
The composite photograph of Lake Tenaya is made of four views taken from the same bank, where Muybridge first made his 1872 Mount Hoffman, from Lake Tenaya, Mammoth Plate #48, reveling in the vast, raw grandeur of nature, followed by Weston’s Lake Tenaya in 1937 and Adams’s Tenaya Lake, Mount Conness, Yosemite National Park, c. 1942, when Yosemite had been well-mapped and its beauty could be contemplated formally. In their 2002 Byron Swatting High-Country Mosquitoes at Lake Tenaya (their personal contribution to the four individual images that make up this larger work), Klett and Wolfe paid homage to the earlier photographers, while animating the landscape with their contemporary presence, compressing the time between their mutual experiences of the transformed landscape.
Provenance[Etherton Gallery, Tucson, Arizona]; purchased by MFAH, 2005.
Exhibition History"Second Nature: Contemporary Landscapes from the MFAH Collection," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 10 - September 25, 2011.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
In pencil verso center: "FOUR VIEWS FROM FOUR TIMES AND ONE SHORELINE, LAKE TENAYA. / LEFT TO RIGHT: EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, 1872. MOUNT HUFFMAN, FROM LAKE TENAYA, MAMMOTH PLATE #48. / ANSEL ADAMS, c. 1942 TENAYA LAKE, MOUNT CONNESS, YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK. / EDWARD WESTON, 1937. LAKE TENAYA / BACK PANELS: MARK KLETT AND BYRON WOLFE, 2002. / BYRON SWATTING HIGH-COUNTRY MOSQUITOES AT LAKE TENAYA."
Cataloguing data may change with further research.
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