“Abandoned grain elevator, Homewood, Kansas, 1973,” by Frank Gohlke.

I didn’t know what the landscape was…I mean the landscape was a picture to me. What I was trying to find was that ideal landscape I’d seen in other pictures. I could never find it, but it was that landscape that I was looking for. And so somehow, even though I was trying, sometimes, I could never see the real landscape. I could never see the landscape that was there. It was always seen through this haze of other pictures, that in some way I was trying to reproduce, or reproduce the feeling of.

— “An Interview with Frank Gohlke (1978)” in Thoughts on Landscape.

I recently started reading Thoughts on Landscape after seeing it recommended on The Online Photographer and (sorry, bookstores) sending the sample chapter to my Kindle. I started reading and to my surprise was almost immediately engrossed.

Gohlke really is unusual — there aren’t that many very good photographers who are also very good at writing lucidly about photography without falling into one or both of the big language traps (techspeak and artspeak) which normally plague people who write or talk about photography. Please, everyone, do buy this book.