trees. (2011)

Our experience of landscape involves a continual tension between the familiar and the new, the typical and the unique, between the tendency to fall back on comfortable habits of perception and the necessity for a heightened attentiveness to what is unprecedented in every situation. As a photographer my relationship to the landscape I photograph is one of dialogue. I am not simply the interrogator of a passive subject; I, too, am being questioned. I look at this place and ask "What is important here?" and the reply comes back, "What is important to you?". The work that results encompasses both questions. The faith one works with is that the answers have a measure of congruence.

Frank Gohlke
Thoughts on Landscape

New Topographics
Robert Adams. Lewis Baltz. Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Joe Deal. Frank Gohlke. Nicholas Nixon.John Schott.
Stephen Shore. Henry Wessel, Jr.
Steidl Press. 2009

First book purchase of 2011 is one that I have been lusting after since it was issued last year to coincide with the exhibition. It has all the image plates from the exhibition, an extensive new essay, as well as a fully reproduced catalog from the original 1975 exhibition. Fantastic.

Landscape is an active principle.Its existence is the result of human actions and natural processes in ever-changing combinations, and its understanding requires that the senses, the mind, and the imagination be fully engaged with the facts in front of us. My study of landscape began when I asked, "Why do these things look the way they do?"

Thoughts on Landscape
Frank Gohlke