The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s new retrospective of the work of landscape photographer Frank Gohlke is called “Accommodating Nature,” but “Accommodating Man” might be a more appropriate moniker.
These 79 austere and enigmatic pictures — spanning from Gohlke’s native Wichita Falls, Texas, of the early 1970s through verdant summertime Massachusetts circa 2002 — remind us that we humans are late-arriving guests on this planet, and that Mother Earth (such a sentimental name for so fickle a mistress) tolerates our intrusion with more patience or less depending on the day or epoch. Where nature has not already shrugged off at man’s attempts to impose symmetry and order, it’s only a matter of time.
Landscape photography had grown stagnant by the Watergate era, when Gohlke arrived on the scene showing his rough-edged pictures of Wichita Falls, with its imposing skies and mercurial, violent climate. Nature photographers “weren’t responding to the world anymore,” as the artist says in a 2007 video interview included in the exhibit, but rather “they were responding to an ideal of photographic excellence that came purely from other photographs.”
Gohlke’s contributions to the watershed 1975 group exhibit “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., helped to inject landscape photography with a new urgency; an overdue acknowledgment that nature didn’t exist only in the remote spaces on which Ansel Adams or Brett Weston preferred to train their cameras. “I’m more interested in what’s outside my door,” Gohlke has said.
Two photo series form a kind of dual centerpiece to the exhibit. The first documents his hometown’s transformation after being ravaged by a tornado in early 1979. Eight pairs of photos capture the same scene in April 1979 and again in June 1980, after homes and businesses had been rebuilt. But in a few places, as the exhibition’s wall text puts it, “nature had won,” and man-made constructs were left abandoned.
The other key series shows us the region surrounding Mount St. Helens for a decade following its 1980 eruption — an event that killed more than 50 people, buried 230 square miles of woodlands in magma and ash, and replaced the mountain’s peak with a mile-wide crater. Gohlke documented the human reaction to the change, as well as the surprising speed with which vegetation returned to the affected areas. He also captured a group of hikers on the crater’s rim in a 1990 photo just moments before an earthquake caused that section to crumble.
You can see why capital-N Nature might be feeling a bit vengeful. Gohlke’s images of Massachusetts’ Sudbury River taken between 1989 and 1992 subtly point out our habit of asking the river to supply beauty, power and commerce while treating it as a handy dumping ground for chemical sludge.
The exhibit, which comes to Washington from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, is a worthy tribute to the two-time Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow who bespeaks a deep appreciation for his gift while managing to leave its mystery intact — even for him.
“To say I am offered the possibility of a picture is true but inadequate,” Gohlke writes in the exhibition catalog. “What begs for explanation is why a tactually, chromatically impoverished scrap of illusion like a photograph should exert such a persistent hold on anyone’s behavior, maker or viewer.”
If you go
“Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Where: The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and F streets NW
When: Through March 1, 2009
Info: Free; 202-633-1000; americanart.si.edu
