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A lifetime's meditation on photography and the landscape.
Frank Gohlke has been a leading figure in American landscape photography for over thirty years. He has photographed grain silos in Minnesota, the aftermath of a tornado in Texas, the destruction and rebirth of the land after the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, and a river's quiet course in Massachusetts. His is a career of deep, unbroken contemplation of the enduring landscape and of our place within it. And for nearly as long as Gohlke has been photographing the landscape, he has been writing about it.
In the spirit of Henri Cartier-Bresson's seminal book, "The Mind's Eye", and Robert Adams's "Beauty in Photography", Gohlke's writings on photography span from the philosophical to the personal. In interviews, essays, artist statements, and lectures, Gohlke focuses both on his own work and life, and on the works and lives of the photographers around him. Woven throughout is his affection for and loyalty to the landscape around him, and his uncanny ability to convey the richness of his experience to readers—in words just as in images.
Affection for the land runs deep in us, and its manifestations—from the garden plot to the national parks—encompass a vast range of human actions and choices. At what point in the history of our species, I wonder, did the watchful, anxious regard for our surroundings, on which survival depended, begin to modulate toward love of a particular place? There must be an Other before there can be love; Eden becomes the object of our desire only after we are cast out. The best landscape images, whatever their medium and whatever other emotions they may evoke, are predicated on that loss. They propose the possibility of an intimate connection with a world to which we have access only through our eyes, a promise containing its own denial. In the case of landscape photographs, the paradox is sharpened because the world represented must have existed for the picture to be made, and yet the existence of the photograph attests undeniably to that world's disappearance.
Culture creates a gulf between people and the world they inhabit. Some human groups experience this rupture as a problem and expend enormous amounts of energy in their attempts to heal it. Americans have been noticeably divided on the necessity, even the desirability, of a harmonious relationship with the natural world; but when we do attempt to establish a connection with larger realities, photographs of unspoiled Nature frequently play a central, almost devotional role. It is an odd choice of tools: the making of a photograph presupposes distance, which accounts, I think, for the elegiac tone, the note of longing that suffuses so many of the finest landscape photographs. I admire those pictures most that acknowledge our predicament without causing us to lose heart, just as I am most touched by those places where damage and grace are inextricably entangled. Photographs bear witness to the facts, be they visible or existential, and it is a fact that our relationship with the natural world is a troubled one that can never be otherwise under the present cultural dispensation.
(from the brief essay, "Thoughts on Landscape", 1995)
Frank Gohlke, 1976
Ben Lifson, 1977
An Interview with Frank Gohlke: Frank Gohlke and Mary Virginia Swanson, 1978
Frank Gohlke, 1979
Silos of Life...,1979
Oil, 1982
Lieben und Arbeiten: Frank Gohlke on Photographic Art, 1984
A Volatile Core, 1985
Aftermath: The Wichita Falls, Texas, Tornado, 1985
Interviews with Artists on Creativity, 1985
Bare Facts: The Photography of Wright Morris, 1986
Frank Gohlke, 1986
Photography and Landscape: Some Thoughts, 1987
Measure of Emptiness, 1992
Recovery and Hope, 1992
Grounding One's Work: Frank Gohlke and Hilton Braithwaite, 1993
Living Water, 1993
Sudbury Lecture, 1993
Looking for Lee Friedlander, 1993
Conversations in the Park, 1994
Thoughts on Landscape, 1995
John Huddleston, 1999
Amy Kubes, 2001
Photography and Place: The Concord Photographs of Herbert W. Gleason, 2005
Jack Lueders-Booth, 2005
Mount St. Helens: Photographer's Notes, 2005
Margot Anne Kelley, 2006
Wayne Gudmundson: Frank Gohlke and Ben Lifson, 2007
Stories in the Dirt, Stories in the Air, 2007
Overview
A lifetime's meditation on photography and the landscape.
Frank Gohlke has been a leading figure in American landscape photography for over thirty years. He has photographed grain silos in Minnesota, the aftermath of a tornado in Texas, the destruction and rebirth of the land after the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, and a river's quiet course in Massachusetts. His is a career of deep, unbroken contemplation of the enduring landscape and of our place within it. And for ...