Mark Citret was born in 1949 in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in San Francisco. He began photographing seriously in 1968, and received both his BA and MA in Art from San Francisco State University. From 1970-1973, Citret attended the Ansel Adams workshop at Yosemite, California, assisting Adams during workshops, in the field and in the darkroom. Following the workshop, Citret lived at and photographed the Halcott Center, a farming valley in New York's Catskill Mountains, for two years, which ultimately resulted in the publication of his book Halcott Center/A Catskill Mountain Valley.

In 1982, Citret joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley Extension. At that time, Citret started specializing in Architectural Photography as a "commercial" field, which quickly carried into him personal work. Staring in the mid-1980s, he produced a large body of work under the title of Unnatural Wonders, which is his personal survey of architecture in the National Parks. He spent four years, 1990 to 1993, photographing for his project Coastside Plant, a massive construction site in the southwest corner of San Francisco. During the 1990s, Citret also began producing a series of limited edition “Hand-Made Books.” Since moving to his current home in 1986, he has been photographing the ever-changing play of ocean and sky from the cliff behind his house. He is currently in the midst of a multi-year commission from the University of California, San Francisco, photographing the construction of their 43-acre Mission Bay life-sciences campus.

Along with his extensive work in the US, Citret has photographed in Prague and Bohemia in the Czech Republic, North Italy, and, in 2000, he was invited to photograph the home of 19th century French photographer Felix Thollier, in the Forez in central France. As well as teaching multiple classes at UC Berkeley for over two decades, Citret has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz Extension since 1988, as well as for organizations such as the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Ansel Adams Gallery, and Santa Fe Workshops.

His work is represented in several photography galleries in the United States, and is in many museum, corporate, and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, and the Monterey Museum of Art. He currently lives in Daly City, California.

Artist’s Statement
"The book Halcott Center/ A Catskill Mountain Valley was conceived and photographed in the early to mid-1970s and waited nearly 30 years for publication. It is a collection of photographs of a farm valley and its inhabitants in New York's Catskill Mountains.

Along the Way is a retrospective monograph covering the years 1971 to 1998. In her introduction to the book, eminent photographer Ruth Bernhard says, "I am touched by the reverence with which Mark's eyes approach the world before him, the tenderness with which he sees subtle simple beauty that is nearly invisible to, and most often ignored by, passersby.”"