Landscape and Memory

Frank Gohlke's Queens Photographs

Photographer Frank Gohlke was in Chicago recently as my invited guest at Columbia College Chicago. Gohlke had been one of my professors in grad school as a visiting faculty in Yale's photo program years ago, and I had fond memories of the man as well as a long standing interest in his work, which is considered seminal in the contemporary landscape tradition, having been included in the groundbreaking "New Topographics" exhibition in 1975. So after a bit of back and forth in setting a date, I had finally been able to arrange for him to come and meet with our students and to give a public lecture. Self interest was also involved, as I wanted to revisit his work in his presence and to have the opportunity to ask him some questions that I didn't have the presence of mind to ask him all those years ago. The landscape, quite frankly, was never a favored genre of mine, which may have accounted for my failure to engage him more deeply when I was in his midst as a student. But having continued to follow his work closely since then, I was by now more steeped in his work, though no more steeped in the genre itself than I had ever been. His visit--and events since--have nudged me ever more forcefully into a deeper consideration of the idea and tradition of the landscape.

Gohlke arrived at Columbia lugging a portfolio of large and beautifully printed black and white photographs that he shared with the Thursday class of students. Among the works he had brought along were photographs from a project that he and Joel Sternfeld had been commissioned to do by Queens College in 2003 and 2004 for installation in the college's new Powdermaker Hall. Working in tandem and alone, the two had gone out into the borough to respond photographically to what they saw, seeking to set down their own subjective responses--as outsiders--to the diverse communities that make up this populous area. There are more languages spoken in this borough than in any other American city, and the diversity of its inhabitants has increased tenfold from when I lived there. I was born and raised in Queeens, and spent a good part of my life traversing the borough by school bus, going up and down Hillside Avenue and the steep hill leading away from it, to first elementary then junior high, high school and then Queensborough Community College. I had also drifted far and wide by foot, bike, bus, train, and the back seat of my parent's car in the course of a wide range of activities. My Aunt Louise lived right next door to us in Jamaica, Queens and my Aunt Delcie and Uncle Ted lived in Corona-East Elmhurst, a half hour drive or so on the Van Wyck and Grand Central Expressways. Between visiting them and engaging in a host of everyday activities over many years of growing up, I had come to know Queens in the way that one only comes to know the place that they are truly from. Viewing Gohlke's photographs reminded me of that fact. Speaking recently with the manager of Columbia College's bookstore, who it turned out was also from Jamaica, I mentioned the illuminated brown painted Santa Claus figure that annually appeared above the doorway to the singer James Brown's house every Christmas season. It's a memory that could only elicit deep laughs from someone who knows that neighborhood and Brown's former house on Linden Boulevard intimately.

As Gohlke showed the students these photographs, my own memories about the place where I grew up were continually jogged. Here a picture of a street with a sign for the Q65 bus visible in the myriad details. There a photograph of a driveway, much like the driveway connecting our house to my aunt's. Looking at the Q65 bus stop picture, I told Gohlke I knew almost the whole route that the bus traversed along Parsons Boulvard from the then almost exclusively white neighborhood of Hillcrest where I seldom ventured to its descent down the hill to Hillside Avenue and on to Jamaica and Shoutheast Queens. The stop on Parsons Boulverad was adjacent to the E and F subway stop where we often waited to pick up my aunt when she came from work. We often met my dad here too, waiting in the car with my mother until he came up from out of the subway. It passes what used to be the Gertz Department store as it continues down New York (now Guy Brewer) Boulevard, eventually passing the Rochdale Village apartments where my brother Ken moved when he left home for the first time upon getting married. My friend Gerry--who passed his brother's unused enlarger and darkroom equipment on to me so I could set up my first darkroom--eventually lived there too, with his wife and children. Gohlke's photograph of the driveway also provoked a rush of memories, inviting me into a space so eerily familiar as to recall the feeling of that narrow drive leading to the backyards of our homes which also provided a bridge between our house and my aunt's, where the back door was always left unlocked. My brother and I staged many a cookie raid through that back door.

Seeing Gohlke's photographs also reminded me of an aborted project I had attempted many years ago, the only proposed project that I never completed. In the mid 1980s, as part of a fellowship awarded by the New York State Council on the Arts, I had planned to make a group of pictures in the Queens neighborhoods where I had grown up. Starting in South Jamaica at 115th Road and Sutphin Boulevard then moving to 119th Avenue and 168th Street and finally to Hollis/Queens Village on 208th Street off of Hollis Avenue, I wanted to photographically revisit the places where I had been shaped. Looking at old family photographs also prompted this desire to return for a "second" look. What I experienced instead, upon visiting the St. Albans neighborhood and my old block there, was a rush of conflicting emotions and motivations that led me to not make a single photograph. Looking for the past, as it were, and confronted by an entirely unfamiliar present, I couldn't exactly figure out a way to reconcile the two, either emotionally or visually. Of course everything looked smaller than I remembered...it always does. And in spite of the address on the house being the same as the address of the house I had once lived in--168-26 119th Avenue--nothing else about the house looked or felt remotely familiar. How do you photograph a memory I wondered. I was still wondering as I walked to the bus stop to get to the subway and then out to Brooklyn and home. Maybe, as they say, you can't go home again. And yet, through the photographs of an outsider--Frank Gohlke--I had momentarily gone back home.

This encounter with Gohlke's Queens pictures led me that evening to Google Maps, where I typed in my old address and then went to "Street View." Sure enough, there it was: my old home looking even less familiar than when I had ventured out to Queens over twenty years ago hoping to photograph it. With Google's 3D Stret View I then preceded to drift through the neighborhood, looking for my aunt's home next door (still one of the most attractive houses on the block) and then to the homes of various friends and neighbors...all still there, though recognizable only by certain details held in memory. The flagpole is still in front of the Outlaw's house, as it had been since the early 1960s or earlier. My brother and I would wait at their house to be picked up by my mother after school. It was there one afternoon that we learned from a distraught Mrs. Outlaw that President Kennedy had been shot and killed earlier that day. Other places had either disappeared or been transformed into unrecognizable places: the corner candystore was gone, a barbershop now stood where Curt's Bakery--home of the finest sweet potato pies--had once stood. I continued this cyber walk, roaming freely throughout the neighborhood as memory after memory was shaken freee. Here again in this very different but highly mediated arena I was having a visceral experience very unlike what I had experienced in actually being there on the block.

Oscar Palacio's American History Lesson

With Gohlke and Google Map's Street View providing food for thought about two mediated ways into the experience of landscape and memory, I left Chicago that weekend to meet up with friends in Massachusetts. One, Oscar Palacio, was exhibiting photographs in an exhibition at Boston's new FP3 Gallery titled Re-represented. The large scale color photographs from his larger project History Re-visited depict places in the American landscape where significant history has occurred or is invoked. This Colombian born photographer is in the midst of a provocative project that casts a questioning and critical eye on American history, and questions how this history is remembered...or not. What is provocative about the project, among other things, is the degree to which memory functions as the critical perceptual device or trigger, since in a number of cases the photographs are rather ambiguous as far as exactly what they describe and in the absence of text or title could easily be anywhere. His photograph "Gettysburg Gate" could well be any weathered wooden fence and posts in the outback, but for the significance of that historical place.

Which is to say that the meaning embedded within the photographs is a received and subjective one, and its appearance is often at odds with the heroic "official" version of history that was enacted or memorialized there. Palacio approaches these sites with an eye that is in equal measure caustic, restrained and unflinching. Much the way that Robert Frank appeared on the American shores from Switzerland turning a jaundiced eye on the American social landscape, so is Palacio making clear the ambivalence and quiet horror at the root of so much of American history. From the locale of the infamous Salem "witch" hunts to the mangy gated Plymouth Rock, he locates the dissonances and unsightly runs in the fabric of American history. In doing so he also questions photography's ability to adequately deconstruct that history or point the way to an affirmative resolution of it.

Landscapes and the Mediated View

Oscar's photographs were fresh in my mind as we set off early the next morning with friends to go to North Adams to visit MassMoCA and the exhibitions there, particularly the massive Sol LeWitt wall drawing projects which are installed over three floors in one of MassMoCA's newly refurbished buildings. Driving through the landscape of the Berkshires in western Massachusetts provided wonderful and fresh food for thought regarding the landscape. As we traversed the winding roads leading to North Adams, evidence of the recent harsh ice storms were apparent from the many sharply bent trunks and snapped branches of small trees and growth along the way. Periodically one comes to one of the expansive and majestic vistas of this mountainous region and catches a glimpse of what much of America must have looked like at its dawn. It's hard to miss these locations of course, since they are usually encountered through the clearing of a viewing platform upon which have been mounted at least two large and unsightly mechanical binoculars, which for a quarter allow you to peer through the lens at the then shaped and mediated experience otherwise unfolding directly in front of you. I've never quite understood the need for these devices at these locations, since the drama lies in the vastness of the landscape laid out before you, and it is the physical sensation of standing alone facing this great expansiveness that seems to be central to the very experience. The binocular visually "bites off" only a small piece of this grandeur, putting a device in between you and the experience. It strikes me as somewhat akin to the tourists who in their travels spend more time picturing the experience than actually experiencing it physically and viscerally. You may not touch, feel or remember much, but you'll remember and have the photographs. And so it is as I contemplate this past week in the presence of so many images that seek to help us remember where "we" have been and to provide a sense of connectedness to the world through optical and mechanical--if not physical-- means.

[For an earlier post about Gohlke, my grad school memories of him and his traveling survey exhibition see "A Brief East Coast Sojourn" in Older Posts]

Guggenheim Fellowship Congrats

The recent fellowship announcement from the Guggenheim Foundation brought the good news that fellow Chicagoans Brian Ulrich (left) and Anna Shteynshleyger were awarded Fellowships in Photography. Both are adjunct faculty at Columbia College Chicago, where Ulrich graduated from the MFA photography program some four years ago. Ulrich has been hard at work on a project examining consumerism in America in all of its varied states, and has been creating a whirlwind of professional activity the past few years, with shows at Rhona Hoffman, Robert Koch and Julie Saul Galleries among others and attendant interest from a range of museums as well. Shteynshleyger, a graduate of Yale's MFA photography program, has been flying lower on the radar, but making no less interesting work photographing in Siberia examining the sites of Russian labor camps under the former Communist regime and continuing her more recent project City of Destiny." She's soloed previously at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in a 12X12 exhibition of her work and at New York's Motti Hasson Gallery. A show of her work is slated for the Renaissance Society here in Chicago early next year. Both photographers reaffirm the vibrancy of photographic practice here in the Windy City and make clear the Guggenheim Foundation's alertness to work of significance and depth wherever it may be found.

Dennis Gallagher - In Memoriam

A friend of mine, the sculptor Dennis Gallagher, passed away last Monday after complications from a sudden illness. The husband of Trish Bransten, father of Rena and Sam, and son-in law of Rena Bransten, Dennis was a gregarious and gifted man with a wonderfully dry sense of humor. His large scale abstract ceramic sculptors had garnered recognition for him over the years with many museum and gallery shows. I last sat with him over drinks in O'Reilly's Bar in his Russian Hill neighborhood in San Francisco, one of those notorious watering holes where numerous stories (and more) have surely passed across the bar. A reunion with Dennis and the rest of the Gallagher-Bransten clan was something I always looked forward to. It's been a bit too long since my last stay in San Francisco. The lights of that wonderful city will shine a little less brightly and defiantly in Dennis' absence. He made the corner of the city wherever he stood, lived and worked a much brighter and interesting place.

Photographs (from top): Frank Gohlke, Queens, NY 2003; Frank Gohlke, Queens, NY 2003; Joel Sternfeld, Queens, NY 2003; Oscar Palacio, "Gettysburg Gate," 2008; Photograph by Scott Speck; Brian Ulrich photograph by Dawoud Bey; Dennis Gallagher photograph by Scott Stohler