John Gossage

“Things, people and events harbor within them more than we can know or understand, until looked at with slight inflection. If you get it right, you don’t have to explain.” With this characteristic off-kilter curiosity, John Gossage (born 1946) continues his loving yet critical, generous yet ironic vision of America; Gossage is as always open to the wonders of the everyday and he relishes the poetry of pattern in his subjects—the ripples of a tablecloth, a grid of tiles, the serpentine curls of an electrical cord.

The title of the book is taken from a handwritten inscription Gossage found on an old but beloved car in Rochester, Minnesota, for him a moment of gritty glory: “It read like an afterlife, a murmur of its inhabitants long after they had parked the car and left.”

This clothbound volume continues Washington, DC–based photographer John Gossage’s (born 1946) astute, critical and witty look at his native America, following Should Nature Change (2019) and the upcoming Jack Wilson’s Waltz. Whether in California, Indiana or New York, whether his subjects are young artists, nondescript suburbia or a dirt road, Gossage’s approach is the same.

“Nicknames,” he writes, “are mostly a second naming of a person after their true character is known. When a child is born the parents choose a name, if it fits all the way though life it is a lucky guess. Picture-making (mine at least) seems to me like trying to find the correct nickname for something I’ve found existing in the world and photographed. This book and these pictures make that attempt with the country of my birth and its citizens.”

In John Gossage's words, this is a book "with a particular context, of photographs to settle the feeling that I did not understand my home. To do that I set out, starting in 2003, to see what clarity my pictures might bring." And so came into being these photos of scenes, things, minor events and the look in the eyes of the young, all taken in everyday non iconic places throughout his travels across America. "Should Nature Change," taken from the Book of Isaiah, is for Gossage both a declaration and a warning: "I am a humanist, like most of us are, I can't really step back to see the beauty and order of all this; closeness brings chaos and dread in this case. We have done harm to the place we live, I'm told, but it seems to me that we have done the most harm to ourselves and our best-laid plans. The planet has a plan to fix this, if we don't."

Jack Wilson’s Waltz is, in the words of its author, a book “with a particular context, of photographs to settle the feeling that I did not understand about my home. To do that I set out, starting in 2003, to see what clarity my pictures might bring.”

And so came into being these photos of scenes, things, minor events and the look in the eyes of the young, all taken in everyday non-iconic places throughout John Gossage’s (born 1946) travels across America. Gossage’s ongoing look at his country within these pages is like a dance: rhythmic, redeeming, restorative, intuitive; but tentatively hopeful. “I would like to believe all of it,” he writes, “that we will be saved, but on Connecticut Avenue there is graffiti that says ‘Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when we need him?’ All I can hear is the faint echoing gun shots coming from Wounded Knee.”