“Aerial View: Looking Southeast Over Windy Ridge and Visitors Parking Lot, Four and One-Half Miles Northeast of Mount St. Helens, Washington, 1983” by Frank Gohlke. In Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, p. 85.

I wanted to be able to use those things which connect to whatever runs deepest in me without giving in to them, to call attention to them without distorting their relationship to the contexts in which they occur…My aim is to make photographs that are at the same time lyrical and intellectual, intensely personal yet rich in information, neither reticent nor effusive.

(From Gohlke’s autobiographical statement in “Camera” 55, no. 5 (1976), reprinted in Thoughts on Landscape)

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that a sizable portion of my photography-related enthusiasm has been directed lately to Frank Gohlke. I recently read Thoughts On Landscape, which collects some of Gohlke’s writings and some interviews, etc., and was enthralled. Gohlke is one of the few photographers who can write well about photography, and he puts his eloquence in service to a way of viewing the world which is full of wonder, penetrating insight, and integrity — qualities which are not usually found in close association.

At the time I read Thoughts on Landscape, I was not very familiar with Gohlke’s photography, and what I had seen (mostly the New Topographics stuff) had not really captured my attention. (Gohlke also mentioned in one of the interviews in Thoughts on Landscape that he wasn’t especially pleased with his photographs in the New Topographics show “as a body of work,” and it definitely seems clear from what I read there that those photographs aren’t strongly representative of Gohlke’s overall career.)

This made reading Thoughts on Landscape a bit strange, as I was gaining what felt like a strong, sympathetic understanding of everything about Gohlke’s photography except for the actual photography. So getting my copy of Accommodating Nature and seeing the photographs in it gave me an odd feeling, probably akin to meeting a pen pal in person for the first time.

The photographs are diverse, including some of Gohlke’s grain elevators, some of his photographs of Mt. Saint Helens and the aftermath of the tornado that struck his home town, some photographs related to his family, some from the Sudbury River, and various other subjects and projects.

The disaster photographs are (of course) the most immediately attention-grabbing. It’s hard not to be gripped by the often staggering scope of both the destruction and the recovery. But what is most notable is Gohlke’s ability to perceive and to photographically depict the underlying order of the processes of destruction — the way they restructure as much as destroy. He integrates that order and that structure into his photographs such that they become inextricable from his composition, as though he were collaborating with the eruption and the tornado to make his photographs rather than merely documenting them by means of a camera.

Gohlke’s photographs of more homely scenes are as impressive, even when their content is undramatic and pedestrian. They are distinguished by Gohlke’s understanding of the places where he has worked, an understanding that is to some degree communicated to the viewer, and which thoroughly informs Gohlke’s composition and his choice of where to place his camera. In this regard he has some of the aspect of Atget — “vivid, precise, intimate, local,” as Gohlke says of Atget in one of the essays in Thoughts on Landscape.

I could go on like this for quite a while, but I’d probably just get more annoyingly laudatory. To cut things short: Go buy these books. Thoughts on Landscape in particular contains some words which I think every photographer ought to read (not just the landscape crowd, either). Seriously. Do it.