LANDSCAPES FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD, PHOTOGRAPHS 1972-1987
PIONEERING MATTAWA
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Frank Gohlke’s most dramatic photos are the ones that demonstrate the violence that often characterizes this interaction. After a tornado hit his home town of Wichita Falls, Texas, in April of 1979, killing 46 people and wiping out 2,600 homes, Gohlke rushed there to record the destruction. He returned a year later, set his camera up at the same sites, and photographed the rebuilt town. One block that was choked with house remnants, wrecked cars, and blasted trees is, a year later, a model–virtually a parody–of suburban American tidiness: there are neat ranch houses, perfectly trimmed lawns, clean sidewalks and curbs. In another pair of views, a One Way sign and light pole that were bent by the tornado are returned to their original positions. If the devastation of the earlier photos is awe-inspiring, then so is the determination of the town’s residents to rebuild: it is as if, having experienced the brute power of nature, they want to remember it as little as possible.
In a scene near Wichita Falls, part of a series featuring places that were significant to Gohlke as a child, a tiny storm cellar faces the vastness of the prairie, its corrugated metal door looking flimsy and inadequate as we remember the destruction of the tornado. There is a shot of a lawn rolling down to the foggy Minnesota shore of Lake Superior, with only a swing set, a badminton net, and a house trailer standing between us and the void.
The third set of photos in the current exhibition documents the growth of Mattawa, a new town in eastern Washington. The photos by Joseph Bartscherer and text by Bartscherer and Willard Wood depict the evolution of the town–or the surrounding countryside, really–from desert to irrigated farmland. As we go through the ranks of photos we see first arid hills and sagebrush flats, then newly laid irrigation pipe and its attendant giant pumps and reservoirs, then the first apple saplings. The text tells of the difficulties facing the Mattawans, modern-day pioneers: gophers, the parching sun, water contaminated from past agricultural use, wind that prevents fruit trees from growing straight; even immigration authorities, a hazard for the illegal Mexican laborers.
