Frank Gohlke

In the summer of 1971, Frank Gohlke (born 1942) 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.

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.