KEY Magazine Fort Worth

Amon Carter Museum’s Photography Exhibit
Explores Interaction of Culture and Nature

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The Amon Carter Museum presents a major mid-career retrospective of the artist Frank Gohlke (b. 1942) from September 15, 2007 through January 6, 2008, in a special exhibition Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke. A leading figure in American landscape photography, Gohlke takes pictures that explore how we live and build our lives surrounded by a natural world that rarely meets our expectations.

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Whether photographing Wichita Falls, Texas, where he grew up; the grain elevators that punctuate the vast spaces of the Midwest; changes brought by the 1980 volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens; or the neighborhoods of Queens, New York, Gohlke captures the tension between humanity and nature, exploring how people adapt to the forces of nature both great and small, even within the confines of their own backyards. “Frank Gohlke helped lead a fundamental shift in how we think about landscape art,” says John Rohrbach, senior curator of photographs at the Carter and curator of the exhibition. “Early in his career, he was one of an influential group of photographers who redefined landscape art away from majestic vistas of untouched grandeur to scenes that capture humanity’s wonderfully complex and oftentimes poignant relationship with the nature world.”

With 85 black-and-white and color photographs some as large as 42-by-54 inches, Accommodating Nature surveys Gohlke’s career, beginning with his work that was included in the seminal 1975 New Topographics exhibition at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and continuing through projects he is immersed in today. Early photographic explorations of his Wichita Falls childhood–his grandparents’ ranch, his suburban home, the architecture of his community–give way to architectural and landscape photographs he took across the Midwest from Minnesota to New Mexico. The show contextualizes two of Gohlke’s most heralded and compelling projects: his depictions of the destruction and rebuilding after a devastating tornado struck Wichita Falls in 1979, and his multiyear investigation of the effects of the massive volcanic explosion that blew off the top of Mount St. Helens in 1980. (The volcano images were the subject of an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005.) By focusing on renewal and re-growth rather than on disaster, they raise provocative questions about our compulsion to continuously control our surroundings. The artist’s oversized color photographs of the Sudbury River in Massachusetts created between 1989 and 1992 eloquently capture the disconnect between the ideal of a bucolic, pastoral New England and the reality of an overgrown river that has been taken for granted. Photographs from commissions and grants from Mississippi to Queens, New York, close the presentation, drawing attention to people’s active accommodations to nature across the country, in rural and urban settings alike.

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About Frank Gohlke

“What’s wrong with telephone poles anyway?” This is the question Frank Gohlke asks after explaining his early attempts at landscape photography. “I kept coming across all of these pesky telephone poles and wires and trailers and roads that weren’t supposed to be in a landscape picture,” he said. Over a period of time, Gohlke concluded that he should not be required to go to places of astonishing natural beauty–like those depicted in the work of Ansel Adams–to take landscape pictures. “I’m more interested in what’s outside my door.”

Gohlke has photographed across the United States and in parts of Europe, but his art is deeply informed by the climate of North Texas, a land of steady wind, where hot summers and cold winters are punctuated by torrential spring thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes.

Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, is free at the Amon Carter.

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