Mark Klett:
Third Views / Second Sights:
A Rephotographic Survey
of the American West

Exhibition Statement

Third Views, Second Sights was an end-of-the-century geographical exploration patterned after the first surveys of the nineteenth century updated with new techniques and sensibilities. The project presented photographs of historic American western sites in light of the dynamic nature of, and changes to the landscape witnessed since the nineteenth century when the great expeditionary photographers – William Henry Jackson, T. H. O’Sullivan, and William Bell – first photographed for the geological and geographical surveys that became the benchmarks for change and continuity as well as for ways of seeing and representation.

The Rephotographic Survey Project revisited and re-photographed these nineteenth-century sites during the late 1970s, resulting in the monumental Second View, presenting 120 pairs of images. Two decades later, Mark Klett and a new survey team re-photographed 110 sites, which assembled the first-view icons of early American photography with second views that explored how these nineteenth-century images were made while documenting a century of change and third views that further record a changing landscape in light of a new generations’ visual sensibilities.

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