Mark Edward Dawson crawls up through a narrow crack in the walls of Fifty Mile Canyon in southern Utah.
Photograph courtesy of Shane Knight

I have been interested in photography as long as I can remember. When I was little I had a theory that photographs were already inside the little film canisters, and when you sent them off to be developed all the store did was take them out, unfold them, and iron out the creases. (I’ve learned a little bit more about photography since then.)

Photographer, educator, traveler

Recent journal entries

Art class with 8th graders

I had an awesome morning earlier this week demonstrating 19th century tintypes to a group of very cool 8th graders in Rachel Giterman’s art class at the James W. Rice Elementary School in Phoenix. We...

New Adventure: Art Fairs!

In yet another fork in the road in Mark’s long list of “careers”, I’ve decided to give Art Fairs a serious go. Several things kinda clicked into place so that it made sense for me...

The Bush Fire Saguaro

Late last year I worked as the drone videographer on a documentary film project about wildfire in the Sonoran Desert. I shared some of my footage with a friend of mine who spotted this one...

Land and Fire – Drone Reel

Over the past year I have had the opportunity to work on a series of short documentary films about land management as it relates to wildfire in the American southwest. I’ve linked to the end...

2021 Year in Review

The other day I imported a new batch of photos into Lightroom. I keep my photos organized into folders with the date and a rough description of the subject matter in the folder name. While...

Albert the Desert Sprite

Kari was fortunate enough to have Mark Klett for a professor during her graduate studies at Arizona State University, and I’ve been thrilled to get to know him in part by tagging along on his...