Etherton Gallery presents Alternative Views, a new exhibition featuring acclaimed photographers Jason Lee and Frank Gohlke. Alternative Views marks a rare opportunity to experience the American landscape through two distinct photographic perspectives. Jason Lee uncovers overlooked and incongruous scenes on his epic road trips, while Frank Gohlke explores the landscape through sustained attention to place. Seen together, their work demonstrates that the American landscape holds space for both the immediacy of a single moment and the layered stories revealed through prolonged observation.
Over the last twenty-five years, celebrated actor, director, and skateboarder Jason Lee has travelled thousands of miles across California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas to make images in small towns and rural communities affected by tectonic changes in American society. Working in both black and white and color, his photographs reflect a cinematic sensibility influenced by films such as Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973), Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984), and David Byrne’s True Stories (1986), the cinematography of Robby Müller, and the observational approach of photographer Henry Wessel. Henry Wessel and Frank Gohlke were both featured in the landmark 1975 New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman House, linking Lee to a lineage of landscape photographers who approached the post war suburban landscape of tract houses, highways and industrial parks with a cool, cerebral eye. Alternative Views presents a selection of Lee’s photographs from his travels through the West, combining a keen attention to the visual ironies of daily life with a cinematic palette and a New Topographics detachment that imbues images such as Lamesa, Texas, 2017, with both aloofness and quiet nostalgia.
Known as the poet of the everyday, Frank Gohlke has spent five decades photographing the American cultural landscape. In the mid-1970s he played a key role in the paradigm shift that redirected landscape photography away from the majestic vistas of Ansel Adams toward the unvarnished reality of everyday life in America—a style that remains vital in contemporary photography. His sustained examinations of the intersection of human activity and natural forces, and demonstrates that the built environment is inevitably subject to the overwhelming force of nature. Alternative Views highlights a selection of Gohlke’s photographs made during the 1970s, including grain elevators set against ominous Midwestern skies, early images of his hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas, and banal landscapes made in Los Angeles and St. Paul, Minnesota, such as Landscape (K-mart), St. Paul, Minnesota, 1974. For most of his career, Gohlke has also been writing about the landscape. His essays, lectures, and interviews articulate his ideas as clearly as his images, establishing subjects like grain elevators, which he has described as “measures of emptiness,” as icons of the American photographic canon.
Alternative Views brings together two generations of American landscape photographers, whose work contrasts ecological concerns with the consequences of economic change. In his plain-spoken images of littered roads and suburban parking lots presented as landscape, Gohlke’s work reveals the consequences of human decisions, creating a sense of responsibility in his viewers, while Jason Lee's photographs pause for the overlooked and forgotten scenes that we barely register in passing, reminding us of what we have lost. Together, their work invites viewers to reflect on human impact and consider our responsibility as stewards of place.
