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Taking Pictures at Castle Rock, After O'Sullivan, Green River, Wyoming
Taking Pictures at Castle Rock, After O'Sullivan, Green River, Wyoming
Taking Pictures at Castle Rock, After O'Sullivan, Green River, Wyoming

Taking Pictures at Castle Rock, After O'Sullivan, Green River, Wyoming

Artist (American, born 1952)
DateAugust 7, 1997
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsSupport: 11 × 14 in. (27.9 × 35.6 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineGift of Jo Whaley and Greg Mac Gregor, 2025
Object number2025.15.2
DescriptionView of rocky desert landscape with mountains in distance. Near center is an image of a photographer with a view camera pointing toward the mountains.
eMuseum Notes
Early in his career as a photographer, Mark Klett was involved in conceiving an extensive research and photographic project to make contemporary images of sites in the American West captured by nineteenth-century photographers, “The Rephotographic Survey” (1977-1979). During the third season, Klett and Gordon Bunshaw visited the Green River area of Wyoming, significant for river and railroad traffic, as well as its buttes and distinctive rock formations. Prominent landscape photographers of the previous century who had preceded them included William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, and A.J. Russell. Klett made two views after O’Sullivan on this visit and returned in 1997 with his colleague Byron Wolfe to photograph the two sites again for an extension of the project, “Third View, Second Sights.” While there, the two made additional exposures, including this more informal shot by Klett, presumably of Wolfe taking a photograph with his view camera. Polaroid Corporation had donated some of their type 55 positive/negative film for the project, which offered an instant print as well as a negative, and Klett continued to use it in his own work, finding it freed him from some of the constraints of the art world as he began to incorporate aspects of his own life and experience into his landscape images. Writing on the front of his print with silver ink is a bit of a transgression, which also gives the piece a more personal, narrative touch.
On View
Not on view
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