FRANK GOHLKE
American
Frank Gohlke approaches photography as a literary
medium. ‘‘Photography,’’ he says, ‘‘compresses a
multitude of histories into a single frame.’’ He re-
lishes the textual possibilities of the scenes he cap-
tures. For him, the process of ‘‘unpacking’’ the
potential meanings in an image, and the contemp-
lation of these meanings, is the key project of pho-
tography. Light, texture, contrast, and other formal
concerns enter into his work in subordinate roles,
aids to the articulation of his thematic interests.
The environment, both natural and built, has
remained the dominant theme of Gohlke’s work
since he began in the late 1960s. Early in his career,
he was drawn to the wide-open vistas of landscapes in
the midwest and western United States. A native
Texan, he returned often to photograph prairies,
either as nearly ‘‘empty’’ expanses or as hosts to an
incongruous variety of architecture. In the more
expansive landscapes, we find evidence of the persis-
tent,ifsubtle,presenceofhumanendeavor—adistant
telephone pole or a dirt track—despite the suggestion
of infinite emptiness. In the others, he emphasized his
concerns for the impact of built structures on the
natural environment. Though banal in themselves,
the houses and simple farm buildings in these images
become catalysts for contemplation when they inter-
rupt otherwise pristine vistas, forcing an understand-
ing of the growing ubiquity of the built environment.
Gohlke strives to create images with deadpan objec-
tivity. The subjects that he selects are dense enough as
they stand; he finds no need to further dramatize the
inherently compelling narrative of his scenes with pro-
vocative angles or radical lighting. This approach
early earned him a place in the watershed exhibition,
New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered
Landscape, held at the International Museum of
Photography at the George Eastman House in 1975.
Most of the photographers in this exhibition, also
including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and
Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott,
Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr., shared a social
concern for the environment that they expressed
photographically in a style merging the goals of
1930s documentary mode projects with the ideals of
straight photography—both of which Gohlke had
become acquainted with directly from Walker Evans.
Gohlke had met Evans in Connecticut. Having
finished his graduate work in English literature at
Yale University, he had stayed on in the area to
study photography with Paul Caponigro. During
this time, he also got to know Evans, who strongly
encouraged his decision to become a photographer.
Gohlke then moved to Vermont for three years and
there established a photography program at Mid-
dlebury College.
In 1971, Gohlke moved to Minnesota. Here he
encountered the enormity and monumental sculp-
tural presence of the grain elevators that dominated
the area where he lived and began a decade-long
engagement with the subject. The elevators were
emblematic of the incredible productive capabilities
of the Midwest, but were also relics of the past.
Though they had once embodied the strength of
the trade driving the local economy, many of these
structures had fallen into various states of ruin by
the 1970s. An elegiac tone permeates much of the
work of this period, but the images are also laced
with an enormous respect for the architectural
grandeur of the hulking giants that lined Minnea-
polis’s midway district. For his book,Measure of
Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Land-
scape (1992), Gohlke selected key photographs
from this period and wrote an insightful essay on
the significance he found in the subject.
Though closely associated with images of Ame-
rican landscapes, Gohlke has also created several
significant bodies of work involving European sub-
jects. In the mid-1980s, for example, he was asked
to join an ambitious effort in France to document
the country’s landscapes. This Mission Photo-
graphique de la DATARorganized a distinguished
group of international photographers whose work
was deeply engaged with the landscape. The project
was openly based on its famous nineteenth-century
predecessor, theMissions he ́liographiques, organized
by the Commission des Monuments historiques
(Commission on Historical Monuments) in 1851 to
inventory France’s architecture photographically.
Tellingly, the impetus for the first project was the
realization that France’s aggressive modernization
efforts under Napoleon III were threatening its
architectural heritage. Likewise, the DATAR pro-
ject responded to the growing awareness that the
country’s landscapes had suffered gravely from aGOHLKE, FRANK