LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Remembering The Future by Mark Klett and William L. Fox by Linda AlterwitzMarch 19, 2026

art; science; nature; technology; medical imaging

Remembering the Future: Nuclear Testing, Rising Seas, and The Marshall Islands (Radius Books, © 2026) documents two research trips to the Marshall Islands in 2023 and 2024 by photographer Mark Klett and writer William L. Fox. They were invited to join an international expedition of artists, to learn about and face the two forces that have profoundly shaped the country’s past, present, and future—nuclear testing and climate change.

The expedition, organized by photographer Michael Light, environmental artist David Buckland, and Marshallese poet, performer, and educator Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, took place within two distinct locations.

The first trip centered on Bikini Island in the northern atolls, a site synonymous with U.S. nuclear weapons testing during the mid-20th century. Once home to a small community, Bikini became a proving ground for atomic and hydrogen bomb detonations, leaving lasting environmental damage and displacing its people.

The second trip focused on Majuro, the nation’s capital in the southern atolls with the largest human population in the country. Unlike Bikini, where the evidence of nuclear testing remains clearly visible, Majuro lives with the urgent threat of rising sea levels. Here, climate change is not abstract—it is immediate.

A key attribute of Remembering the Future is its collaborative structure. The book opens with black-and-white archived photographs sourced from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Archives and Records Administration. These photographs of nuclear detonations along with their captions, provided by Michael Light, were originally included in his book 100 Suns, confronts us with the dawn of the nuclear era.

Glass float found on Aomen, site of a bunker used to photograph a thermonuclear explosion

The photographs are designed within the book to wrap around one page to the next. This formatting decision evokes the idea of voyage, movement, and discovery, paralleling the unfolding text. It moves away from the more traditional monographic format and invites readers to experience text and image as an integrated whole.

Klett’s photographs create a visual narrative tracing the Marshallese people and their altered lands. We learn a lot by evidence of what is left behind. From a photograph of an unassembled plastic model of a B-29 bomber—complete with miniature bombs—left on a table in a former dive operation’s kitchen on Bikini, to an image of the tallest and still growing structure in Majuro: a one hundred foot high, four-acre dump.

The texts by Fox are both factual and reflective, describing his experiences with a keen awareness of past human recklessness alongside the immediacy of the present moment.

Together, photographs and texts offer a larger context to better understand the residual traces of a nuclear age marked by disregard for human communities and fragile ecosystems. Yet even within this reality, the work suggests a measure of hope—through art, adaptation, and the generations who will inherit and carry these lessons into the future.

The northern hemisphere of a globe found in the tidal zone on Majuro, with the Marshall Islands appearing just above the water line

Ceiling fan warped by heat and humidity, dorm room built to house visiting divers, Bikini

Unassembled plastic model of a B29 bomber left on a table in a former dive operation’s kitchen, Bikini

“Welcome to Bikini” sign at the overgrown airstrip on Enue, Bikini Atoll

Cables used to carry electronic signals from test sites to the bunker at Aomen

Leaving Bikini island for the last time

Alson at an art exhibition, showing his model of a traditional Marshallese canoe merged with a navigational stick map for the atolls

Mark Klett is a photographer whose background includes working as a geologist before turning to art practice. He makes work that responds to historic images or texts; investigates the relationships between time, change, and perception; and explores the language of photographic media through technology.

Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock- Krasner Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. His work has been exhibited and published in the United States and internationally for over forty years and is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The National Museum of American Art; the National Gallery of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Center for Creative Photography; the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Mark Klett is the author of twenty photographic books and is Regents’ Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University.

William L. Fox is Director Emeritus of the Institute for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, and has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published sixteen books on cognition and landscape, hundreds of essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. His most recent title is Michael Heizer: The Once and future Monuments (2019). Fox is also an artist who has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows in eight countries since 1974. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation and has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, the Australian National University, and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

Tags: Mark Klett, William L. Fox