It happens that grain elevators explode. Every once in a while you hear about a huge silo in Minnesota or Kansas that blows up like a puffball in a summer rain. It’s not the sort of accident you’d expect–what could be more stable, more earthbound, than grain?–but it turns out that the weight of all that wheat or another crop in an elevator can generate high temperatures in which grain dust can become about as volatile as gasoline. When an elevator explodes it reminds us, briefly, that the grain is as much a product of air and sun as of soil.
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Fortunately, Frank Gohlke is around to teach us the same lesson without that sort of danger and inconvenience. Gohlke, who now resides in Massachusetts, is a landscape photographer who lived in Minneapolis for most of the 1970s and ’80s. His new book, Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape, showcases a body of work he started in 1972 and completed in 1977 to memorialize the towering structures that he found not only graphically compelling but also emblematic of the midwestern landscape.
Flip a few pages and you see the results: photographs of elevators either surrounded by verdant countryside or towering over small towns only a few blocks square. In a typical Gohlke image the grain elevator’s silos may be the only rounded forms in a landscape of unrelieved straight lines: roads, railroad tracks, and power lines all shoot toward the flat horizon in perfect one- or two-point perspective.
