ARTISTS
Frank Gohlke: Texas Memories
Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Frank Gohlke: Texas Memories. Throughout his nearly five-decade career, Frank Gohlke has continued to visit and photograph his native North Texas, particularly his hometown of Wichita Falls. It was there that he made some of his earliest photographs as a teenage member of the local camera club. Returning as a mature photographer, Gohlke developed the approach that has come to define his career: investigating how the natural landscape determines patterns of human activity, settlement, and use through long engagement with his chosen sites. Gohlke has said, 鈥淚 have always felt that it鈥檚 a part of my responsibility to what I photograph to know as much about it as possible.鈥� And elsewhere: 鈥渁 landscape whose story is known is harder to dismiss.鈥� It is fitting, then, that the place Gohlke knows best鈥攈is home鈥攈as sustained his longest-running photographic inquiry.
The places in North Texas that Gohlke has gravitated towards hold deep personal significance for him. His boyhood home and neighborhood are the subjects of a selection of early photographs, many of which are being shown for the first time in this exhibition. Also on view are pictures of the Red River and the Wichita River; both occasional bringers of water to the parched region, but running low and slow much of the time. As a boy, Gohlke believed the riverbeds were plagued with quicksand and venomous creatures; it was only when he returned with a camera that he began to appreciate the peculiar beauty of the mud-choked rivers winding through the North Texas prairie. And there is the cattle ranch that was home to Gohlke鈥檚 aunt and uncle and two generations before them. Known in the family simply as The Ranch, the place held mystical sway over Gohlke鈥檚 imagination as a child. He has photographed the property over the years, even after it was sold out of the family and a half-mad tenant burned the main house to the ground trying to clear a nest of rattlesnakes from the basement. The exhibition charts Gohlke鈥檚 evolution as a photographer against The Ranch鈥檚 dissolution in pictures of the site made over a fifty-year period.
Gohlke鈥檚 connection to the Wichita Falls area is more than memory; when he returns, it is to visit a community of family and friends who know the celebrated photographer affectionately as 鈥淔rank Famous.鈥� Gohlke made the most recent photographs in Texas Memories during a 2016 a trip to his hometown for an event at the Wichita Falls Art Museum, which shows his 鈥淎ftermath鈥� portfolio annually. His continuing impulse to photograph his hometown is a product of both its place in his past and his present integration into the community. For Gohlke, human relationships, history, and the land are impossible to disentangle in his native North Texas. His complex, sustained connection with the place has yielded a remarkable body of photographs that are as intimate as they are incisive.
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Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Frank Gohlke: Texas Memories. Throughout his nearly five-decade career, Frank Gohlke has continued to visit and photograph his native North Texas, particularly his hometown of Wichita Falls. It was there that he made some of his earliest photographs as a teenage member of the local camera club. Returning as a mature photographer, Gohlke developed the approach that has come to define his career: investigating how the natural landscape determines patterns of human activity, settlement, and use through long engagement with his chosen sites. Gohlke has said, 鈥淚 have always felt that it鈥檚 a part of my responsibility to what I photograph to know as much about it as possible.鈥� And elsewhere: 鈥渁 landscape whose story is known is harder to dismiss.鈥� It is fitting, then, that the place Gohlke knows best鈥攈is home鈥攈as sustained his longest-running photographic inquiry.
The places in North Texas that Gohlke has gravitated towards hold deep personal significance for him. His boyhood home and neighborhood are the subjects of a selection of early photographs, many of which are being shown for the first time in this exhibition. Also on view are pictures of the Red River and the Wichita River; both occasional bringers of water to the parched region, but running low and slow much of the time. As a boy, Gohlke believed the riverbeds were plagued with quicksand and venomous creatures; it was only when he returned with a camera that he began to appreciate the peculiar beauty of the mud-choked rivers winding through the North Texas prairie. And there is the cattle ranch that was home to Gohlke鈥檚 aunt and uncle and two generations before them. Known in the family simply as The Ranch, the place held mystical sway over Gohlke鈥檚 imagination as a child. He has photographed the property over the years, even after it was sold out of the family and a half-mad tenant burned the main house to the ground trying to clear a nest of rattlesnakes from the basement. The exhibition charts Gohlke鈥檚 evolution as a photographer against The Ranch鈥檚 dissolution in pictures of the site made over a fifty-year period.
Gohlke鈥檚 connection to the Wichita Falls area is more than memory; when he returns, it is to visit a community of family and friends who know the celebrated photographer affectionately as 鈥淔rank Famous.鈥� Gohlke made the most recent photographs in Texas Memories during a 2016 a trip to his hometown for an event at the Wichita Falls Art Museum, which shows his 鈥淎ftermath鈥� portfolio annually. His continuing impulse to photograph his hometown is a product of both its place in his past and his present integration into the community. For Gohlke, human relationships, history, and the land are impossible to disentangle in his native North Texas. His complex, sustained connection with the place has yielded a remarkable body of photographs that are as intimate as they are incisive.
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