Traces of Eden: Travels in the Desert Southwest

by Mark Klett

In the tradition of the great 19th century landscape photographers, Klett has produced a beautiful body of work that documents his travels throughout the southwestern states. Klett uses Polaroid materials, writing date and title directly onto each print. Traces of Eden is beautifully printed both in duotone and color on matte stock.

Genres: Photography

48 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1986

Reviews

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am grateful for the edges of photographs of the desert, the borders of the image that enclose, capture, and focus the desert's seemingly endless space. Standing in the desert itself is at times a disorienting experience, and it's difficult to stabilize vision. Mark Klett's photographs of the desert landscape distill the experience into images of quiet strength, but also reveal secrets that escape us in its presence.

I sometimes describe images by photographers well-versed in the beliefs of their New Topographics elders as "forgotten landscapes". For me, their subjects are places of happenstance: the fabricated subdivision, the utilitarian strip mall, the flyover tract of desert. They are often places that we have to encounter, rather than seek out from the heart--a cast of extras playing bit parts compared to the plot-turning love interest that steals the show. Klett doesn't necessarily strive to change this order of value, but his images do remind us that these places are not forgotten. Each photograph in the book bears the mark of man's interaction with the landscape, sometimes as harmless as a shadow, other times destructive and irreversible.

I admit that after catching onto this trend, I began to seek the evidence of man in each image in this book, which turned the experience into a bit of a "Where's Waldo?" activity. I found that I had to move past these elements of human interaction, or rather reintegrate them into the overall image, in order to understand the photographs as wholes rather than collages.

Rarely is such time invested in looking not wisely spent. Klett's views of the desert (but not deserted) landscape reveal the existence of memory in what I would have once described as "forgotten". The remembering, however, is not done by man. It is the land itself that remembers. The passage of millennium, impossible for man to know or record, is remembered in the formation of mountains, the creation of canyons, and the striations of petrified rock. Even the most fleeting conversations with man are remembered by the land: the bullet-riddled saguaro, the graffiti on a boulder.

I once thought these landscapes were forgotten because I was placing the ability and responsibility to record on that of man. But Klett's photographs teach us that the land alone is time's keeper.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very close to 5 stars. The Denis Johnson essay is rambling but really works (that's what you do in the desert, right?). The photos show man's impact on the landscape with much more wit than the New Topographics. And God I love Type 55! For those interested in photographing the deserts of the Southwest, a used copy of this book is $5-6 well spent.