Grain Elevator and Lightning Flash, La Mesa, Texas

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Grain Elevator and Lightning Flash, La Mesa, Texas

Artist Frank Gohlke (American, born 1942)

Date1975 (negative); 1985 (print)

DimensionsOverall: 19 15/16 x 16 in. (50.6 x 40.6 cm);
Image: 13 1/2 x 13 5/8 in. (34.4 x 34.6 cm)

MediumGelatin-silver print

ClassificationPhotographs

Credit LineGift of Catharine and Severn Joyce

Object number

1990.68

Not on View

Label TextFrank Gohlke’s photographs are created with precision and economy, inspired by the straightforwardness of their subjects—they are quiet, spare, and elegant. He first gained notice as one of ten photographers included in the landmark exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape. Organized in 1975 by the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, this exhibition helped to redefine landscape photography in America. Rather than romanticized views of wilderness, the photographers in this exhibition described places where human presence was acknowledged as the actual condition of our time. Gohlke’s photographs are often about the temporal and physical presence of the weather—of the wind, rain, and heat of the plains—reflected in a vast and shifting sky. Memory also plays an important role in Gohlke’s image-making, whether he is photographing the backyard of his childhood home, or an isolated stand of trees marking a long-since-disappeared farmstead, or a thunderstorm passing over a small Texas farm town.Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, Buildings Real and Ideal, Nov. 15, 2007 - Jan 27, 2008.

Toledo Museum of Art, Refraction/Reflection, April 20-September 2, 2012.

Toledo Museum of Art, The American West: Photographs of a New Frontier, January 15-May 15, 2016.