Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews [Paperback]

Frank Gohlke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Photographer Frank Gohlke has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been shown internationally and is included the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale. Born in Texas, Gohlke received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. At Yale University, where he received his MA in English in 1966, Gohlke met met Walker Evans and then studied privately with photographer Paul Caponigro. Gohlke has taught at Massachusetts College of Art; and the universities of Harvard, Princeton and Yale. He is now Laureate Professor of Photography at the University of Arizona and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson, Arizona.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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)

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Hol Art (October 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1936102064
• ISBN-13: 978-1936102068
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #640,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars photography book, August 11, 2010

By 

Ron W. Evans (Charlottesville, Virginia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews (Paperback)

Just received this small paperback book entitled Thoughts on Landscape by the photographer Frank Gohlke. If you make photographs, regardless of the content, you should have this book. Gohlke does a wonderful job of expressing what's on his mind when he trips the camera shutter, and what goes on before and after. The writing is down to earth, articulate, and insightful from a photographer that has been involved in making photographs for most of his life. If you have passion for photography, get this book. If you don't have passion for photography, this may begin to move you in that direction.

Ron Evans
Charlottesville, Virginia

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Articulate photographer, October 12, 2010

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Kay Sera - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews (Paperback)

It's great to track a photographer's career through his own words, especially when, for the most part, the person can write well. Gohlke's book is a time travelogue that provides a personalized window on the progress of photography from marginalized art and personal passion in the early 1970's to full fledged museum-worthiness today. Illuminating and very worthwhile to anyone interested in contemporary photography.

4.0 out of 5 stars 3.5, oh well, 4, January 23, 2012

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E. Klatt (CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews (Paperback)

Frank, you were right to question the fattening up of this collection. Three hundred pages might have been two. Though, when you do realize return on your academic investment, the depth of your considerations finds wonderfully adroit expression. A reader might begin this book with the last section; "Stories in the Dirt, Stories in the Air" then wander backwards and stop at moments like "Looking for Lee Friedlander". It is a book through which to cherry pick. (There is too much redundancy to call it clearly or succinctly comprehensive, but what is good really plumbs deep.)