Gohlke, Frank, 1942-

Frank Gohlke began photographing as a twenty-five year-old student of English Literature in the Yale Graduate Studies program. When a bout of writer’s block left him doubting his future as a doctoral candidate, he began experimenting with a recently acquired Super 8 movie camera, resulting in a few little films of the Connecticut shoreline. Frustrated by the limitations of his amateur equipment and the expense of the process, he bought a 35mm reflex camera and started taking pictures. Before long he had received encouragement from Walker Evans and sought out the tutelage of Paul Caponigro. All inclinations toward a career in academia vanished, and photography remained. What began as an elegant form of procrastination has evolved into a decades-long career of lyrical and studied investigation into the vicissitudes of a man-altered landscape.

As a native of Wichita Falls, Texas, a city that resides not in a corner of the world but atop one of its uncreased vastnesses, Gohlke’s photographic sensibility has always tended towards the unadorned. Gohlke is acutely aware that the provisions man makes for his survival are more often than not quotidian in character. He conducts an excavation of the present, undertaken without artifice and with a scientific diligence. He is drawn to landscapes marked (and at times, marred) by their legacy of human habitation. Although seldom seen in his spare compositions, the human figure is not absent from Gohlke’s pictures: it is latent within them.

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