Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews

A lifetime's meditation on photography and the landscape.

Frank Gohlke has been a leading figure in American landscape photography for over thirty years. He has photographed grain silos in Minnesota, the aftermath of a tornado in Texas, the destruction and rebirth of the land after the Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington, and a river's quiet course in Massachusetts. His is a career of deep, unbroken contemplation of the enduring landscape and of our place within it. And for nearly as long as Gohlke has been photographing the landscape, he has been writing about it.

In the spirit of Henri Cartier-Bresson's seminal book, The Mind's Eye, and Robert Adams's Beauty in Photography, Gohlke'™s writings on photography span from the philosophical to the personal. In interviews, essays, artist statements, and lectures, Gohlke focuses both on his own work and life, and on the works and lives of the photographers around him. Woven throughout is his affection for and loyalty to the landscape around him, and his uncanny ability to convey the richness of his experience to readers--in words just as in images.

Photographer Frank Gohlke has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been shown internationally and is included the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale. Born in Texas, Gohlke received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. At Yale University, where he received his MA in English in 1966, Gohlke met met Walker Evans and then studied privately with photographer Paul Caponigro. Gohlke has taught at Massachusetts College of Art; and the universities of Harvard, Princeton and Yale. He is now Laureate Professor of Photography at the University of Arizona and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson, Arizona.