I'm Toby Jurovics, curator of photography
at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
and I'd like to welcome you to our
presentation of "Accommodating Nature: The
Photographs of Frank Gohlke." Through the
exhibition we traced Mr. Gohlke's work
for almost 35 years. Mr. Gohlke's
photographs are spare and elegant; they
speak quietly and yet they also speak
with great affection for the American
landscape. Traveling from his hometown of
Wichita Falls, Texas to Minneapolis,
across the high plains, the volcanic
landscapes of Mount St. Helens, the
Sudbury River in Massachusetts, and far
beyond, Frank Gohlke captures a landscape
that is often unruly and sometimes
destructive. Throughout the exhibition we
see a constant theme of tension and
affection for the landscapes that
surround us. Frank Gohlke's photographs
touch on the most complicated themes of
American photography from the past 30
years-- he finds a landscape that is not
pristine, yet one that is also not beyond
our reach. He shows us how we can find a
home in the places that surround us.
"Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of
Frank Gohlke" was organized by the Amon
Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It's
on view at the Smithsonian American Art
Museum from December 5th, 2008 through
March 3rd, 2009.
The following is an interview with
Franck Gohlke done in Fort Worth, Texas on
the occasion of the exhibition.
Why do i
make photographs? I think when my
patience with English literature as an
academic study ran out photography just
felt like the best thing I'd ever done.
I just liked it. I liked the whole
process, the walking around with a camera
without any purpose in mind except to
respond and going into the dark room and
doing all that magic stuff. There was
just a very congenial kind of activity
and it made me feel as if I were doing
something important, I don't know why... but
it just felt like me and it felt
important. If you're going to take the
landscape as your subject you've really
got to know what has come before and
what the assumptions on which it was
based are and make choices about it.
You know, what do I use and what do I discard
from the past? I mean, I think that's what
any artist does. The landscape work that
was being done by a lot of people who
were influenced by Adams and Weston and
then Minor White and Caponigro, just
seemed really dead to me. I mean, all the
conviction had gone out of it. It was
just-- they weren't responding to the
world anymore, they were responding to an
ideal of photographic excellence that
came purely from other photographs. By
the late 60's and early 70's
I... you know, a lot of people couldn't
ignore anymore what was happening to the
places they grew up in. They were
changing toward greater and greater
uniformity. You can't ignore the problem
of increasingly unindividuated scenes and
trying to assert some kind of human
distinctions within it, so there was that
continual tug which is one of the things
that makes photography so much fun and
so interesting... between the world you'd
like to see and the world you have to
look at.
Why would you take a photograph of that house?
I grew up in a town where there
were lots of houses like that so it was
a kind of nostalgia-tinged exercise and
also because visually it does one of
those things that architecture
traditionally has done which is to
affirm an order different from the order
of nature, which makes us feel as though
we have some control over how the world looks.
What's fascinating in that picture
to me, you know... just the individual
touches that make it different from
every other house on that street and
just something about the dissonance
between the kind of grand claims of
those trees-- which seemed as if they
should be flanking some kind of you know
classical temple-- and the modesty of the
house whose presence it is announcing. I
used to describe it in all kinds of
whimsical ways, like the exhaust from a
vegetable rocket.
I like being required
to pay attention. An example of that
would be my dissatisfaction with the
kinds of reports that I read in the mass
media about Mount St. Helens. Maybe [I]
want to go out and see for myself, you
know? I knew that wasn't a story that
came anywhere near the complexity of the
event, so in part it was a kind of
corrective and I suppose in in some way
there has been that admonitory aspect:
'Don't forget about this. Look at this.
This is not as simple as you think it is.'
Life's inherently messy nature is utterly
indifferent to our notions of order and
yet we keep trying to make things as
orderly and predictable as we can and
ultimately each one of us fails--
sometimes that failure is comic and
sometimes it's tragic and sometimes it's
neither one, it's just a fact-- and I think
part of what one tries to do as a person
who makes images, however you make them,
is to make that image pull as much of
the viewers total experience, conscious
and unconscious, learned and instinctive,
as possible to create these semblances
of life.