Wind, water, and molten rock constantly tear apart and resculpt the natural world we live in, and people have always struggled to create structures that will permanently establish their existence on the land. Frank Golhke has committed his camera lens to documenting that fraught relationship between people and place, and this retrospective collection of his work by John Rohrbach reveals how people carve out their living spaces in the face of constant natural disruption. An acclaimed master of landscape photography, Golhke explores in Accommodating Nature how people configure the places where they live, work, and commune, both on an everyday level and in the aftermath of catastrophic destruction. Whether a ranch house anchored fast on an endless Texas plain, the shattered buildings and whipped trees left by a category 5 tornado, or the jagged cliffs of ash and rock created by the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens, the photographs unearth the ways in which new homes and lives emerge from the fragments of the old. Thought-provoking essays by Rebecca Solnit, Frank Gohlke, and John Rohrbach expand upon the issues raised by the images, contemplating the complexities of human and cultural geography and the relationships we have with our respective place. An arresting and vibrant visual essay combining magnificent vistas with intimate emotional detail, Accommodating Nature exposes the intricate threads that bind our lives to the land surrounding us.

Frank Gohlke has been a leading figure in American landscape photography for thirty years. Photographing grain silos in Minnesota, the aftermaths of a tornado in Texas and 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 land, and of our livelihood and survival within it. And for nearly as long as Gohlke has been photographing the landscape, he has also 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 span from the philosophical to the personal. Throughout is his abiding sense of curiosity, an affection for and loyalty to his subject, and an uncanny ability to convey the richness of his experience to readers. In this collected volume, Gohlke¿s talent for photographing the landscape proves rivaled only by his talent for writing about it.

In 2003, Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld were commissioned to photograph one of the densest concentrations of ethnic diversity in the world, the borough of Queens in New York City. After more than a year of photographing everything from corner bodegas to the borough's boundaries, Gohlke and Sternfeld had not only captured the complicated dy - namic that sustains Queens and its myriad communities; they had also evolved a unique theory of landscape photography in which landscape is a visible manifestation of the invisible emotions of its inhabitants. The collection inherits the strength of each photographer's eye. Gohlke's Queens consists of streets, houses, fences, gardens, parklands, shorelines, and waste spaces, the terri - tory where human arrangement contends endlessly with the forces that undo it: unruly vegetation, weather, rot, decay, and the "creative destruction" of a voracious commercial culture. Sternfeld focuses on the indigenous shops, restau - rants, mosques and temples that make a walk in Queens feel like a walk in Thailand, India or Peru-or all of them at once. Often tucked into homes or converted factories, these plac - es signify a home country, or perhaps a home country that exists more in the mind than in actuality. In conjunction with an essay by the acclaimed writer Suketu Mehta, this book is a powerful instrument for understand - ing a landscape that seems to defy interpretation. Gohlke and Sternfeld successfully make the dizzying patchwork of Queens accessible and visible.

On the morning of May 18, 1980, the Mount St. Helens volcano in the forests of Washington State exploded. First, months of building interior pressure triggered a massive landslide, removing the entire north face of the mountain. This avalanche was followed immediately by a violent eruption that ultimately expelled over a quarter-billion cubic yards of magma. The blast devastated roughly 250 square miles, leaving behind scoured rock, millions of fallen trees, and mud-choked river valleys. Yet the land returned, gradually restoring and regenerating itself. Beginning in 1981 and continuing until 1990, photographer Frank Gohlke made regular visits to the devastated land around Mount St. Helens. This collection of photographs of biblical grandeur records both the ravaged terrain around the volcano in the early years after the eruption, and the regrowth--slow but extraordinary--of the region's natural forest. Mount St. Helens: 1981 to 1990 contains a dramatic selection of these photographs; an introductory essay on the volcanology and geology of the Pacific Northwest by Kerry Sieh and Simon LeVay; and notes on the images by the photographer himself.

"In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is", said Gertude Stein. From the Midway area of Minneapolis to the prairie grasslands of Kansas, the American landscape is characterized by this spaciousness--and by the presence of windowless, rumbling, enormous grain elevators, rising above the steeples of churches to announce the presence of a town and to explain, in great measure, the function of its inhabitants. Why did their builders choose that particular form to fulfill a practical necessity? And how does the experience of great emptiness shape what people think, feel, and do? Frank Gohlke, one of America's foremost photographers of landscape, has pondered and documented the relationship between these enormous structures and the emptiness of the surrounding landscape for the past two decades. The result is this evocative sequence of images, beginning with Gohlke's earliest formal studies of structural fragments and their mechanisms, and gradually expanding to depict the grain elevator as a part of the landscape. His camera eventually retreats so far that the grain elevator disappears in the horizon, and only the landscape--the "space where nobody is"--is visible. Introducing the photographs is a personal essay by Gohlke on the relationship between people and their space, and the ways in which that relationship actually creates a landscape. A concluding historical essay by John C. Hudson details the development and function of the grain elevator and its geographical and economic role in American life.

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 Gohlke's 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 Gohlke's 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 family's infrequent camping trips, while late-night rambles through Gohlke's Minneapolis neighborhood led organically to his series of dramatic night pictures in the last section. Notwithstanding their various subject matter, Gohlke's photos in this book collectively perform a kind of timeless alchemy on the everyday stuff of visual experience. Looking at these photos, it's hard not to believe that things really look like that; but we know they don't. In the interstice between the picture's testimony and the evidence of our senses is where my photos reside. Frank Gohlke

Selección de fotos de la exposición de Britt Salvesen?NewTopographics?, que presentada en 1975 diversas fotografías de fotógrafos norteamericanos. Este libro presenta la importancia histórica de la exposición. Se seleccionaron trabajos de la exposición, vistas de instalación, comparaciones contextuales y una lista de comprobación ilustrada del espectáculo.