20 Facts About Frank Gohlke

Frank Gohlke was born on April 3,1942 and is an American landscape photographer.

Frank Gohlke has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant.

Frank Gohlke's work is included in numerous permanent collections, including those of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Frank Gohlke bought his first camera as a teenager and was a member of the Wichita Falls camera club during high school, eventually purchasing an enlarger and learning to process gelatin silver prints.

Frank Gohlke began making near-still films with a Super 8 movie camera before transitioning to 35-mm still photography.

Frank Gohlke eventually showed his work to documentary photographer and then-Yale professor Walker Evans, whose mode of seeing the American vernacular landscape would exert an enduring influence on Gohlke's work.

From 1967 to 1968, after leaving Yale, Frank Gohlke studied with the landscape photographer Paul Caponigro, making weekly visits to Caponigro's Connecticut home.

In 1971, Frank Gohlke relocated to Minneapolis, and a year later, in 1972, he began his first major body of work, documenting the grain elevators of America's central plains.

From his early aesthetic interest in grain elevators, Frank Gohlke became fascinated by their design, their connection to the surrounding landscape, and their function within the cities and towns they occupied.

Shortly thereafter, Frank Gohlke returned home to photograph the wreckage left in the tornado's wake.

Frank Gohlke returned to rephotograph the same sites a year later, crafting precise reconstructions of his previous views in order to document the city's recovery.

In 1981, several months after the eruption of Mount St Helens in Skamania County, Washington, Frank Gohlke made his first trip there to photograph the volcano and its environs.

From 1981 to 1990, Frank Gohlke made five visits to the region, in many cases returning several times to the same location to record its transformation.

Frank Gohlke authored short didactic texts to accompany the images.

Frank Gohlke has, in his work, dealt consistently with questions of human usage and perception of land.

In 2013, Frank Gohlke received a Fulbright travel grant to travel to Kazakhstan in order to document the disappearing wild apple forests surrounding the Kazakh city of Almaty.

The accompanying catalog, entitled Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, includes essays by Gohlke, Rebecca Solnit and John Rohrbach, Senior Curator of Photographs, Amon Carter Museum.

Frank Gohlke has taught photography at Middlebury College; Colorado College; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Massachusetts College of Art; and at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities.

In 2007, Frank Gohlke accepted a teaching position at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts in Tucson, Arizona, where he now lives and works.

Frank Gohlke has been a visiting artist in the photography program at Bard College.