Biography
Mark Citret was born in 1949, and first picked up the camera around 1963, though it didn’t become serious until the summer of 1968. In 1969 he attended the Ansel Adams Photography Workshop in Yosemite, and subsequently assisted Adams at Yosemite workshops from 1970 to 1973. He has received both his BA (1973) and MA (1979) from San Francisco State University. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums, including The Los Angeles County Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Oakland Museum, and the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography. His work is represented by many prominent galleries, including The Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, and the Weston Gallery in Carmel.
His photographs have been published in numerous magazines and books, including photographic and architectural anthologies, as well as four monographs: Halcott Center: A Catskill Mountain Valley, a book of photographs done in New York State in the mid 1970s, with an introduction by Ansel Adams; Along the Way, a retrospective of his photographs from 1971 to 1998, with an introduction by Ruth Bernhard; Signs Taken for Wonder, a catalogue of an exhibition of his photographs at the Monterey Museum of Art in 2002, and Parallel Landscapes, his photographs of the evolution of a massive construction site in the southwest corner of San Francisco, with an introduction by Al Weber.
He has been active as a photography instructor and lecturer for over 50 years, teaching workshops for many organizations, including the Ansel Adams Gallery, the Center for Photography in Woodstock, Santa Fe Workshops, Viewpoint Gallery in Sacramento, and Elder Hostel’s Road Scholar Program. He has been an instructor for both the University of California Berkeley’s and Santa Cruz’s Extension programs since 1982.
He has photographed architecture and the “built environment” throughout the United States and selected European cities, but primarily in San Francisco and its environs. For 30 years he worked with numerous architects and builders throughout Northern California, photographing a wide variety of residential, commercial, and institutional architecture.
In 2000 the University of California, San Francisco, commissioned him to photograph, as part of the University’s “Art Project”, the building of their Mission Bay Biotech Campus and Hospital. This commission was completed in 2015.
He has served as “Artist in Residence” in Yosemite National Park (2016), and Zion National Park (2019).
Since 2014 he has been photographing in the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park.