Beschreibung
In the summer of 1971 Frank Gohlke moved with his wife and young daughter from Middlebury, Vermont to Minneapolis, Minnesota. His vocation as a photographer had begun four years prior, but he had yet to define the subject that would occupy him for the next 45 years: the landscapes of ordinary life. The three bodies of work brought together in Speeding Trucks and Other Follies were all made between Gohlkes arrival in Minneapolis and the end of 1972 when he began photographing grain elevators, a project that first established his renown. In different ways these early series obliquely describe Gohlkes process of adjustment to his new surroundings. The Speeding Trucks photos of the first section began when Gohlke noticed how the shadows of the elm trees that once lined most Minneapolis streets were momentarily materialized on the bodies of passing trucks. The travel trailers in the second section were all found in a Minnesota State Park on one of the familys infrequent camping trips, while late-night rambles through Gohlkes Minneapolis neighborhood led organically to his series of dramatic night pictures in the last section. Notwithstanding their various subject matter, Gohlkes photos in this book collectively perform a kind of timeless alchemy on the everyday stuff of visual experience.
Autorenportrait
Frank Gohlke was born in 1942 in Wichita Falls, Texas. In 1967 he abandoned the study of literature to become a photographer, encouraged by Walker Evans, who saw his first photographs, and Paul Caponigro, with whom he studied informally at his home in Connecticut. Gohlke has received two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, two from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Kazakhstan in 2013-14. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including three solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art. His books include Measure of Emptiness (1992), Mount St. Helens (2005), Accommodating Nature (2007), Thoughts on Landscape (2009), and Landscapes as Longing with Joel Sternfeld and Suketu Mehta, published by Steidl in 2016.
