#84 Noticing Things, with Artist Mark Citret
“The single motivating factor that runs through all of my work is the simple fact that I find the world to be an endlessly fascinating visual smorgasbord. The camera is the perfect instrument, and photography the perfect medium, to respond to this stimulation. …
… I can say that I find the rebar and concrete of a construction site every bit as beautiful as fir trees delicately outlined by freshly fallen snow, and the apparent solidity of an office building as lyrical and ephemeral as fog floating over a sunlit ocean. Perhaps that is why photography, (at least in the way I practice it), while irrevocably tied to the way things literally appear, is nonetheless a magical medium of the imagination.”
— Mark Citret (Artist Statement, Gallery 291, September 25, 2013
Mark Citret, “Clearing Fog” (1990)
Mark Citret, “Empty Room” (1992)
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” —Garry Winogrand
Mark Citret “Deviant Chain Link Fence” (1998)
Mark Citret “Tennis Nets” (1995)
Mark Citret "Grotto House" Zion, (2019)
Mark Citret was born in 1949 in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in San Francisco. He began photographing seriously in 1968, and received both his BA and MA in Art from San Francisco State University.
Most of Citret’s work is not specific to any locale or subject matter. Still, he has worked on many photographic projects over the course of his career, and continues to do so. From 1973 to 1975 he lived in and photographed Halcott Center, a farming valley in New York’s Catskill Mountains. In the mid to late 1980s he produced a large body of work with the working title of “Unnatural Wonders”, which is his personal survey of architecture in the national parks. He spent four years, 1990 to 1993, photographing a massive construction site in the southwest corner of San Francisco. This work is published as a book entitled “Parallel Landscapes” (2017). He was also the "artist-in-residence" in Yosemite National Park in 2016 and Zion National Park in 2019. Since he moved to his current home in 1986, he has been photographing the ever changing play of ocean and sky from the cliff behind his house.
He has taught photography at the University of California Berkeley Extension since 1982 and the University of California Santa Cruz Extension since 1988, and for organizations such as the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Ansel Adams Gallery, and Santa Fe Workshops. His work is represented by prominent photography galleries in the United States, and is in many museum, corporate, and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Monterey Museum of Art. A monograph of his photographs, Along the Way, was published by Custom & Limited Editions, San Francisco, in 1999.
He lives in Daly City, California.
(from .http://www.mcitret.com/)
Architectural Geology, essay by Citret (http://www.mcitret.com/?p=99166)
How Buildings Learn, by Stuart Brand
Willy Ronis
Willy Ronis, “Nu provençal” (1949)
Jim Marshall “Hendrix” (1967): Jimi Hendrix at his sound check during the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
Jim Marshall “Dylan” (1969)
Jim Marshall, the artist behind some of classic rock’s most legendary images, including Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at Monterey in 1967 and Johnny Cash flipping the bird at San Quentin in 1969, is the subject of a new documentary film. “Show Me The Picture: The Story of Jim Marshall,” (Daily Variety)
ON THE WALL of Mark Citret
Josef Sudek, from the Magic Garden series (c. 1950s)
Eugene Atget, fountain detail, (1900) —Plate 48 in vol. 2 of NY MOMA’s four book Atget set.
Frederick Evans, cathedral detail (c.1905)
Rubin’s Portfolio of Photography | Rubin’s Instagram (@droidmaker)
Suzanne’s Instagram (@sfritzhanson)
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