Frank Gohlke

Frank Gohlke (born April 3, 1942) is an American landscape photographer.

He has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant.

His work is included in numerous permanent collections, including those of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

After graduating high school, Gohlke first attended Davidson College in North Carolina before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin, where he received a B.A. in English Literature in 1964.

He went on to complete an M.A. in English Literature at Yale University in 1966.

During a period of writer's block while at Yale, Gohlke returned to photography.

He began making near-still films with a Super 8 movie camera before transitioning to 35-mm still photography.

He eventually showed his work to documentary photographer and then-Yale professor Walker Evans, whose mode of seeing the American vernacular landscape would exert an enduring influence on Gohlke's work.

From 1967 to 1968, after leaving Yale, Gohlke studied with the landscape photographer Paul Caponigro, making weekly visits to Caponigro's Connecticut home.

In 1971, Gohlke relocated to Minneapolis, and a year later, in 1972, he began his first major body of work, documenting the grain elevators of America's central plains.

Over the next five years, from 1972 to 1977, the project took Gohlke from Minnesota to Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.

From his early aesthetic interest in grain elevators, Gohlke became fascinated by their design, their connection to the surrounding landscape, and their function within the cities and towns they occupied.

His photographic practice grew to include a research component whose relationship to the pictures themselves was one of reciprocal influence.

Gohlke was one of ten photographers selected to be part of "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape," the landmark 1975 exhibition at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum).

Gohlke was one of ten photographers to be included in the 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” organized by William Jenkins, then the assistant curator at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum).

“New Topographics,” which represented a burgeoning movement within landscape photography toward unvarnished consideration of the vernacular landscape, has come to be regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the medium.

During a career spanning nearly five decades, Gohlke has photographed grain elevators in the American midwest; the aftermath of a 1979 tornado in his hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas; changes in the land around Mount St. Helens during the decade following its 1980 eruption; agriculture in central France; and the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan.

Frank Gohlke was raised in Wichita Falls, Texas.

He bought his first camera as a teenager and was a member of the Wichita Falls camera club during high school, eventually purchasing an enlarger and learning to process gelatin silver prints.

His early subjects included family members and models hired by the camera club.

Late in high school, Gohlke's interest in photography waned; he sold his enlarger and, save for family snapshots, stopped taking pictures altogether.

On April 10, 1979, an F4 tornado struck Gohlke's hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas, killing 42 people, injuring 1,700 more, and significantly damaging an 8 mile-square swath of the city.

Shortly thereafter, Gohlke returned home to photograph the wreckage left in the tornado's wake.

He returned to rephotograph the same sites a year later, crafting precise reconstructions of his previous views in order to document the city's recovery.

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In 1981, several months after the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington, Gohlke made his first trip there to photograph the volcano and its environs.

In order to convey the enormity of the event, which devastated approximately 250 square miles, Gohlke employed a variety of approaches, including aerial and panoramic views and sequential photography (rephotography) over various periods of time.

From 1981 to 1990, Gohlke made five visits to the region, in many cases returning several times to the same location to record its transformation.

He authored short didactic texts to accompany the images.

A selection of the photographs was eventually published as Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Gohlke's first monograph.

In 2004, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted “Mt.

St. Helens: Photographs by Frank Gohlke,” a solo exhibition (with accompanying catalog), co-organized by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, and John Szarkowski, Director Emeritus, Department of Photography.

Gohlke has, in his work, dealt consistently with questions of human usage and perception of land.

He has photographed farmland in central France (on a commission from la mission photographique de la DATAR); conducted a personal survey of a portion of the line of latitude 42˚30’ N, which bisects Massachusetts; made two series of photographs tracing the courses of the Red River in North Texas and the Sudbury River in Massachusetts; and documented the urban landscape and residential architecture of Queens, NY (conjointly with photographer Joel Sternfeld, on a commission from Queens College).

A mid-career retrospective of Gohlke's work was organized by the Amon Carter Museum (September 22, 2007 – January 6, 2008).

The accompanying catalog, entitled Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke (Center for American Places and Amon Carter Museum, 2007), includes essays by Gohlke, Rebecca Solnit and John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photographs, Amon Carter Museum.

Gohlke has taught photography at Middlebury College; Colorado College; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Massachusetts College of Art; and at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities.

In 2007, Gohlke accepted a teaching position at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts in Tucson, Arizona, where he now lives and works.

In 2013, Gohlke received a Fulbright travel grant to travel to Kazakhstan in order to document the disappearing wild apple forests surrounding the Kazakh city of Almaty.

A selection of Gohlke's and Sternfeld's pictures were published as Landscape as Longing (Steidl, 2015).