Frank Gohlke

Evans and J. B. Jackson — Reading Buildings as History

Frank Gohlke was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1942 and studied English literature at the University of Texas and Yale University. At Yale, he encountered Walker Evans; he later studied photography with Paul Caponigro. Evans’s attention to roadside buildings and Caponigro’s sensitivity to natural forms and light would come together in Gohlke’s photographs of plains that include agricultural structures.^*1

Alongside his photographic training, Gohlke’s understanding of landscape took shape through the writings of cultural geographer J. B. Jackson. In a 2011 interview, he recalled learning to see roads and buildings as traces of how people had used land over time.^{*20 Railroad tracks beside a grain elevator mark the route by which harvested crops were gathered and shipped out of town. A photograph looking up at such a building and another looking out from the elevator across the plains reverse the relationship of structure and surrounding land.}

New Topographics — Choosing Human-Altered Landscapes

In 1975, Gohlke participated in New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House. The exhibition assembled photographs of residential developments and industrial structures. Robert Adams’s suburbs and Gohlke’s grain elevators appeared as different forms of human-altered land.^{*13 Curator William Jenkins emphasized a restrained descriptive manner, although the participating artists did not all approach their subjects in the same way.*15 The exhibition’s later reassessment in the 2000s encouraged renewed debate about whether the participants could be understood through a single aesthetic.*17 Their distinctions also emerge from the economic activities behind the images: Adams followed the spread of suburban housing, while Gohlke photographed structures that collected agricultural harvests amid expanses of farmland.*14}

Measure of Emptiness — Grain Elevators and the Scale of the Plains

During the 1970s, Gohlke repeatedly photographed grain elevators rising from the plains against skies and roads. In Grain Elevator, Near Kinsley, Kansas, the building’s scale emerges from its proportions relative to the road and sky.^{*5 Grain elevators accumulated harvested crops for rail shipment to cities; together with roads and tracks, they formed a visible part of the network linking fields to markets. Landscape from the Grain Elevator, Happy, Texas reverses the viewpoint, looking from the structure out over the plains.*6 The upward view of the tower and the outward view from it invert the usual balance between building and landscape. In Large Grain Elevators, Enid, Oklahoma, the open sky again surrounds the structures’ vertical lines and establishes their apparent height.*18}

In Measure of Emptiness, repeated photographs of similar facilities show how a grain elevator can serve as a measure of the distant plains and, up close, become an immense wall. Rebecca Solnit has connected the elevators’ vertical shapes to the horizontal fields in which grain is grown.^{*24 The difference between crops spread over land and crops stacked inside storage towers makes the operations of an agricultural economy visible as contrasting forms.}

Grain Elevators and Lightning Flash — Architecture and Weather

In Grain Elevators and Lightning Flash, Lamesa, Texas (1975), a sudden flash of lightning appears behind the straight lines of a grain elevator.^{*4 The ordered silhouette of the industrial structure shares the frame with weather beyond human control. The photograph pairs fixed architecture and a momentary atmospheric event. Four years before the tornado photographs in Aftermath, a single image already held agricultural infrastructure and volatile weather together.}

Aftermath — Revisiting a Tornado-Struck Town

A tornado struck Gohlke’s hometown of Wichita Falls on April 10, 1979, directly killing 42 people.^{*25 After photographing the devastated neighborhoods, he returned to the same locations in 1980. The paired photographs in Aftermath compare the traces of destroyed houses with rebuilding a year later, seen through matching compositions.*12}

Photographs of Maplewood Avenue taken in April 1979 and June 1980 from the same direction make the purpose of the return especially clear.^{*20 Keeping the camera position and viewpoint consistent allows viewers to compare changes in the neighborhood over a little more than a year. While news photography conveyed the immediate damage, Gohlke made the subsequent work of residents rebuilding and using the land central to his pictures. In a 2009 interview, he said that he was especially interested in what people did after a disaster.*19 Matching the location of houses and surviving trees makes the progress of reconstruction legible. Revisiting the sites also involved memories of the town he had known before the tornado.}

Choosing the same viewpoints again in 1979 and 1980 combined a study of disaster damage with memories of streets Gohlke had known since childhood. A selection of works he discussed in 2011 included the tornado pairs alongside photographs of his mother and daughter and the backyard of his childhood home.^{*20 The 1972 family picture and the views made after the 1979 tornado therefore approach Wichita Falls through both personal history and the history of the disaster.}

Mount St. Helens — Views From the Ground and the Air

Following the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, Gohlke began visiting the area in 1981 and returned through the 1980s. He combined pictures made on the ground with aerial photographs and panoramas, following the crater, fallen forests, and slopes covered in volcanic ash.^{*7 Blowdown at Ryan Lake (1982) looks across fallen trees near ground level, while aerial views reveal the spread of the crater and damaged forest from above. Together, these vantage points permit comparison between the details of destruction and its wider topographical scale.}

Mount St. Helens: 1981–1990 — Revisiting the Changing Terrain

Mount St. Helens: 1981–1990 examines the aftermath of the eruption and changes in terrain and vegetation over time. Comparing View of Mount St. Helens Crater from Independence Pass (1981) with later views reveals how the scale at which the landscape can be read changes with the terrain.^{*9 In Mount St. Helens Shrouded in Its Own Cloud (1983), clouds obscure part of the mountain’s form.*8 Set against the 1981 view into the crater, the 1983 image makes differences in vantage point and weather evident; the intervening years add another dimension to the comparison.}

Unlike a neighborhood where roads and houses are rebuilt after a tornado, volcanic terrain changes over periods longer than the span of ordinary human rebuilding. Aerial and ground photographs can hold the immediate traces of an event alongside the much slower course of recovery. Gohlke’s repeated visits between 1981 and 1990 extend the interval of observation far beyond the approximately one-year comparison of Aftermath.

The Sudbury River — Pollution Beyond the Visible Landscape

From the late 1980s into the early 1990s, Gohlke photographed the Sudbury River in Massachusetts. In 1993, the photographs formed an exhibition and book, The Sudbury River: A Celebration.^{*21 Tire, the Sudbury River, Framingham (1991) shows a discarded tire along the water. The watershed also had a history of chemical pollution associated with dye production and other industry. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has investigated and undertaken cleanup of mercury and other contaminants originating from the Nyanza Chemical Waste Dump.*22}

Gohlke also photographed Nyanza Superfund Site, Above the Sudbury River (1990) and Chemical Brook Enters the Sudbury River (1991). Read with EPA records, these specific locations identify sources of pollution invisible in the river’s appearance. A 1994 review discussed the discrepancy between the scenes’ seemingly peaceful surfaces and the water’s documented contamination.^{*23 The two images, one showing the waste site in 1990 and the other the brook’s entry into the river in 1991, acquire a connection to the history of mercury pollution through the specificity of their titles. The subtitle A Celebration conveys affection for the river, while government investigations describe toxins absent from its tranquil surface.*22 Considered alongside EPA documentation, the photographs offer evidence for thinking about both the beauty and the pollution of the Sudbury River.}

Landscape as Longing — The Immigrant Borough of Queens

Commissioned with Joel Sternfeld in 2003 to photograph Queens, New York, Gohlke turned to fences, gardens, vacant lots, shorelines, and houses in neighborhoods shaped by immigration. In the book Landscape as Longing, Gohlke’s black-and-white photographs occupy the first section, followed by Sternfeld’s color pictures. The two bodies of work approach the same borough from distinct vantage points.^*16

That division into first and second sections also structures the reading of different traces of everyday life in the borough.^{*16 An essay by writer Suketu Mehta appears at the book’s end. Gohlke’s pictures of fences, planted gardens, and altered houses register how residents have adapted the plots on which they live. Jackson’s account of roads and gardens as records of daily use informs this attention to fences and additions to houses. The sequence moves from Gohlke’s black-and-white views of residential spaces to Sternfeld’s color photographs of people around shops and religious institutions, connecting different aspects of an immigrant city.*16}

New Topographics — The Photographer’s Choices Behind a Restrained Image

The restrained appearance associated with the 1975 New Topographics exhibition was itself a product of the photographer’s decisions. In Gohlke’s grain elevator photographs, the extent of the sky and distance from the structures shape the result.^{*3 In a distant view of an elevator near Kinsley, Kansas, the proportions occupied by road and sky determine how large the building appears.}

In a 2011 interview, Gohlke described choosing the limits of a frame as a way of presenting a particular “place.”^{*20 Roads and fields continue outside any photograph. In Landscape from the Grain Elevator, Happy, Texas, his viewpoint reverses that of a picture made looking up from the ground: the elevator becomes a position from which to look across farmland. The importance of selecting a vantage point becomes clearer still in repeated photographs after a disaster. For the Maplewood Avenue pair of 1979 and 1980, returning to precisely the same place was a condition of making the work.}

Accommodating Nature — A History of Land in Constant Change

The 2007 retrospective Accommodating Nature brought together grain elevators, tornado-damaged neighborhoods, volcanic landscapes, and suburbs to trace interactions between people and their environment.^{*11 Grain elevators and houses rebuilt after a storm bear direct signs of human work. Regrowth around Mount St. Helens records change moving at another pace. Construction, reconstruction, and attempts to address pollution each leave alterations that cannot simply be reversed.}

Gohlke continued returning to grain elevators and sites transformed by disaster. His photographs trace evidence left by economic activity, recovery, and contamination across different spans of time, often in places bound to his own memories. Where Aftermath compares a little over a year, Mount St. Helens: 1981–1990 follows approximately a decade. The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s retrospective located this work within the ongoing transformation of land by humans and natural forces.^{*2 Rebuilding in Wichita Falls and the return of vegetation around Mount St. Helens occur through different agents and at different speeds. Revisiting each landscape enabled him to picture a passage of time that could not appear in the initial exposure.*10}