One of my Christmas presents this year was Accommodating Nature by Frank Gohlke. I’d seen the New Topographics at SFMoMA prevously and, while the exhibition catalog didn’t grab me, the works by Gohlke and Lewis Baltz did. Kinda typical, I refrain from spending $50 on a photo book and add $100 of books to my Amazon wishlist.
In any case, while I’d flipped through my present on Christmas day, I only just found time to read it.* The photography, as expected, was very good. And it was also nice to see that all the good things I’d heard about his writing were in fact true. Plus, a bonus essay by Rebecca Solnit…
*Yes, I actually read the text in my photo books.
My favorite part? His thoughts about experiencing the landscape by car and trying to present what you see in the single-point perspective of the window at 50mph with a still photo. This is very much something I think about all the time. I’m always going somewhere when I see things that look promising and it’s very rare that I’m in a position where I feel like I can just pull over and stat shooting whenever I feel like it.
n j w v 
7 thoughts on “Accommodating Nature”