Art Review : How One Man Leaves His Mark on the Planet : In his highly personal photographs, Mark Klett records our impact on the environment, and its on us.

It’s all too easy to start feeling like a penitent abuser when looking at photographs of the scarred, exploited, overdeveloped landscape. Images that document the degradation of nature also document, by implication, the degradation of our own consciousness.

Mark Klett, whose work is on view in a compact, provocative show at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, shows us skies striped with telephone wires and rocks tattooed with modern graffiti. But his photographs are far more than moralistic poster children for ecological awareness. For one thing, they lean further toward the personal than the propagandistic. Even his grandest views of the Western landscape bear the mark of intimate, familiar encounters. They read like an eloquent diary, not a political manifesto.

More significantly, Klett brings to the surface photography’s richly ambiguous entanglement with time. While a photograph captures only the precise moment of its making--a moment that passes instantly like every other into history--the image’s convincing appearance seems to keep that moment current, fixing it ever in the present. Klett plays deftly and thoughtfully with that contradiction, turning it so that all of its facets shine.

The Huntington show, organized by curator Jennifer Watts, samples Klett’s work from the past 20 years, beginning with the Rephotographic Survey Project of the late 1970s. With a historian and another photographer, Klett located the sites of more than 120 photographs taken in the American West during the 1860s and 1870s by Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson and others, for military and geological surveys. Reshooting the pictures a century later affords some remarkable comparisons.

Two stunning examples here, in which the original view and Klett’s version hang side by side, show time acting on opposite impulses. In one, a hundred years have added nothing but graceless suburban clutter to a formerly austere view of rock bluffs in Wyoming. In the other pair, time has acted as an eraser, rubbing away the traces of a Nevada mining compound, leaving only patches of raw dirt among the scrub where buildings once stood.

Following quite literally in the footsteps of the great landscape photographers of the past has perhaps humbled Klett, but also demonstrated vividly to him the fallacy of believing in any photograph as authoritative and definitive. In nearly every image from the 1980s and ‘90s, he plants reminders--his hat, his shadow, his camera--that these are the views of one man. They don’t define their subject, only his particular take on it. These photographs, made throughout the West, abound in both beauty and irony. They feel earnest, reverential, free of pretense, and dense with wonder.

For the last few years, Klett has been creating a body of work he calls “Third View,” which extends the reach of the Rephotographic Survey with further study of the same sites, through photography, collected artifacts and computer media. The computer program, a work-in-progress, allows one to hear a bit of oral history while looking, on screen, at the visual records of Klett’s various journeys. The program also enables users to superimpose 19th and 20th century views of a site onto one another--a snazzier but not necessarily more revealing version of the side-by-side comparison.

The use of new media is predictably seductive, but it doesn’t add much to the already substantive dialogue Klett has launched through his relatively traditional black-and-white prints. “Third View,” he says in the exhibition brochure, “is a way to humanize the landscape”; but imposing human values on the landscape is--for better or for worse--what we’ve been doing all along. Klett’s stirring work points to that process, but ultimately it endorses just the opposite, what poet Robinson Jeffers proposed half a century ago: “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; / We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

* Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, through Sept. 26. (626) 405-2100. Closed Mondays.