The saguaro cactus only grows in the Sonoran Desert in the states of Arizona (USA) and Sonora (Mexico). Individual cactus may grow as tall as twelve meters and live over two hundred years. The series was originally conceived as saguaro portraits and given the title “Desert Citizens” when it began in 1987. For centuries, desert people have considered saguaros to be the souls of lost ancestors.
Most of the photographs for this series were completed in black-and-white and Radius Press published the work as the book Saguaros in 2007. Color photographs were occasionally made on film when the series was restarted in 2012 using a medium format digital back. Work continues into the present.
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Mark Klett is a photographer whose background includes working as a geologist before turning to art practice. His interests include making new works that respond to historic images; creating projects that explore relationships between time, change, and perception; and exploring the language of photographic media through technology.
Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock- Krasner Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. His work has been exhibited and published in the United States and internationally, and is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The National Museum of American Art; the National Gallery of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Center for Creative Photography; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
Mark Klett is the author of seventeen photographic books and is Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University.
The above photographs appear for the first time in Contra Viento, at permission of the artist, and may not be reproduced without his consent.