Mark Klett: Camino del Diablo

Much of Mark Klett's (born 1952) work as a photographer has entailed conversations with historical images. For this project, Klett worked only with the account of a young mining engineer named Raphael Pumpelly who wrote of his perilous journey through Arizona and Mexico in 1861 on the lawless Camino del Diablo or "road of the devil." More than 150 years later, Klett traversed the same route, making photographs in response to Pumpelly's words. Today, most of the Camino is located on the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range and the border is a militarized zone patrolled by government agents and crisscrossed by air and ground forces practicing for war. Unable to trace the engineer's exact steps, Klett created images that are not literal references to specific places or events; rather, he sought to produce a more poetic narrative of their shared experience of the Arizona desert.