2004 SPE Annual ConferenceSpeakers

Photographer Frank Gohlke, whose books include Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape and Landscapes from the Middle of the World, teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He has recently studied photographer Herbert Gleason (1855-1937), whose work is known mainly to the small universe of Thoreau followers around Concord, MA and its Holy Pond. Gleason made photographs that are, for all their modesty, both an anticipation of and a paradigm for developments in landscape photography more characteristic of the end of the 20th Century than its beginning. This talk introduces a body of work overdue for recognition on photographic grounds, and describes how these pictures have entered Gohlke's own consciousness, illuminating the intricate connections between landscape and place, self and site, and the literary and the visual imaginations.