Description: Three centuries ago, the Los Angeles River meandered through marshes and forests of willow and sycamore. Trout spawned in its waters, and grizzly bears roamed its shores in search of food.
Brief description: Frank Gohlke is one of america's most famous photographers and currently the Laureate Professor Of Photography at the University Of Arizona. His photographs have been exhibited widely, including in the influential New Topographics Exhibition (1975) at the George Eastman House as well as in solo exhibitions at the Amon Carter Museum. His books of photography include Measure Of Emptiness: Grain Elevators In The American Landscape (Johns Hopkins, in association with The Center For American Places, 1992), Mount St. Helens (Museum Of Modern Art, 2005), and the retrospective, Accommodating Nature: The Photographs Of Frank Gohlke (Center For American Places, in association with the Amon Carter Museum, 2007).
Review Quotes: Kolster's ambrotypes and resultant prints of the L.A. River are as close as we get in our own time to the capturing of a mutable natural form via a process in which chance and variability are to be celebrated. One can speak of the grandeur of the series, its beauty, and its capacity for intellectual pleasure. For me, it's the audacity of the photographer working in and against time to fashion an image made of light; it's the symbiosis between collodion and human skin; it's the power inherent in an older form to make us see our contemporary landscape afresh.--Horace D. Ballard, Ph.D., Curator of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art