Background
Frank William Gohlke was born on April 3, 1942 in Wichita Falls, Texas, United States.
(In photographs made between 1972 and 1977, Tucson-based p...)
In photographs made between 1972 and 1977, Tucson-based photographer Frank Gohlke traveled back and forth through the central tier of states from his then home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the Texas Panhandle, seeking an answer to the puzzle of the grain elevators' extraordinary power as architecture in a landscape whose primary dramas were in the sky.
https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Gohlke-Measure-Emptiness/dp/3958294987/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Frank+Gohlke&qid=1577438547&sr=8-3
2019
Frank William Gohlke was born on April 3, 1942 in Wichita Falls, Texas, United States.
Frank Gohlke received his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1964 and his Master of Arts in English from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1966.
In 1971, Frank 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 1972-1977, the project took Frank Gohlke from Minnesota to Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. 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.
Frank 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. "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.
On April 10, 1979, an F4 tornado struck Gohlke's hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas. Shortly thereafter, he 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.
In 1981, several months after the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington, Frank Gohlke made his first trip there to photograph the volcano and its environs. From 1981 to 1990, he 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.
In 2004, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted "Mt. St. Helens: Photographs by Frank Gohlke," a solo exhibition (with accompanying catalog).
Frank 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, he accepted a teaching position at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts in Tucson, Arizona, where he now lives and works.
(In photographs made between 1972 and 1977, Tucson-based p...)
2019