Gary Saretzky Photo Books
Klett, Mark. Desert Legends: Re-storying the Sonoran Borderlands. Photographs by Mark Klett.
Klett, Mark. Desert Legends: Re-storying the Sonoran Borderlands. Photographs by Mark Klett.
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Henry Holt, 1994. Text by Gary Paul Narhan. Photographs by Mark Klett. Hardcover, 1st printing, hardcover with protected dust jacket, fine/fine. Issued at $45. Summary:
Desert Legends: Re-storying the Sonoran Borderlands (published in 1994 by Henry Holt and Company) is a compelling, 207-page collaborative monograph combining the black-and-white landscape photography of Mark Klett with the lyrical, environmental prose of ethnobotanist and author Gary Paul Nabhan. The book offers a nuanced, multi-disciplinary portrait of the 1,000-square-mile Sonoran Desert straddling the United States-Mexico border, challenging traditional myths of the American Southwest.
Core Themes and Content
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A Counter-Narrative to the "Empty" Desert: Rather than depicting the desert as a barren, hostile wasteland or an untouched wilderness, the collaboration aims to "re-story" the region. Through Nabhan’s narrative essays and Klett’s imagery, the book presents the Sonoran borderlands as a deeply inhabited, culturally rich landscape with an extensive human history layered into its ecology.
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The Intersecting Border Culture: The work focuses heavily on the social and political complexities of the Arizona-Mexico border. It explores how indigenous communities (such as the O'odham), Mexican ranching culture, and American expansion intersect and adapt within a shared ecosystem, showing that political borders cannot fully segregate the region’s interconnected natural and human histories.
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Human Footprints in the Landscape: In keeping with Klett’s signature style, the photographs reject idealized, romanticized wilderness framing. Instead, Klett captures the everyday realities of the contemporary desert—such as graffiti on canyon walls, campfires, historic monuments, and target-shot desert signs—treating human interventions as a continuous, defining element of the geography.
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Ecological and Mythological Symbiosis: The text and images work in tandem to unpack the folklore and local "legends" attached to desert landmarks. By grounding cultural myths in concrete botanical and geological realities, the book emphasizes how the physical environment shapes the spiritual and practical survival strategies of the people who inhabit it.
By fusing scientific insight, cultural history, and unvarnished documentary photography, Desert Legends serves as an essential ecological testament that replaces the superficial mythology of the Southwest with a complex, lived-in portrait of a vital borderlands community.
Mark Klett (born 1952) is an acclaimed American landscape photographer, author, and educator renowned for his innovative approach to capturing the intersection of history, geography, and the passage of time in the American West. Born in Albany, New York, Klett initially pursued a background in the sciences, earning a BS in geology from St. Lawrence University in 1974 before turning fully to visual art and completing an MFA in photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in 1977. His unique scientific background fundamentally shaped his photographic practice, leading him to serve as the chief photographer for the groundbreaking Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP) in the late 1970s and later directing the "Third View" project. Through these collaborative endeavors, Klett pioneered precise methodologies for "rephotography"—locating the exact 19th-century tripod coordinates of frontier photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan to re-photograph the changing vistas across decades. Over his prolific career, he has authored or co-authored nearly twenty books, including Seeing Time: Forty Years of Photographs, and dedicated decades to academia as a Regents' Professor of Art at Arizona State University. Awarded prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Klett’s conceptually rigorous, dual-perspective images are held in over eighty permanent museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, cementing his legacy as a vital re-inventor of the landscape tradition.
