Time in the West: Photographs by Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe and Mark Ruwedel

This second installation in the new photography galleries in the Bloch Building features two significant bodies of contemporary landscape work from the Hallmark Photographic Collection.

Large composite color panoramas by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, and elegant black-and-white prints by Mark Ruwedel, both use the majestic landscape of the American West to deal inventively with the ideas of time, history and memory.
The Klett & Wolfe images are an extension of the Re-photographic Project that began in the late 1970s. With scientific precision, Klett and his associates located the vantage points used by such celebrated 19th-century landscape photographers as Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, to make their own photographs. The resulting pairs of images have much to say about both the changes in the land over 110 or more years and the surprising nuances of individual artistic vision.  In their work in this exhibition, Klett and Wolfe focus on the photographic legacy of one of America’s greatest natural wonders: Yosemite National Park.

Mark Ruwedel has worked diligently over the last 20 years on his own visual survey of the American West. Ruwedel is interested in the human history of the West: all of his photographs depict traces of earlier cultures on the skin of the land. The photographs on view are primarily drawn from two series: views of the delicate traces of ancient American Indian footpaths and the now abandoned routes of the first trans-continental railroad lines.

This exhibition is supported by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Hall Family Foundation. Midwest Airlines is the official airline sponsor.