Washington, DC - Frank Gohlke (b. 1942) is one of the most influential and respected landscape photographers of the last three decades. "Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke," a major mid-career retrospective of the artist’s work, will be on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Dec. 5 through March 3, 2009. The exhibition features 79 black-and-white and color prints, spanning the early 1970s through 2004. Gohlke’s photographs reflect how people interact with an environment that can never fully be controlled. This is the final venue for the national tour.

Whether photographing his hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas, the grain elevators that punctuate the vast spaces of the Midwest, the aftermath of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington or the neighborhoods of Queens, N.Y., Gohlke deftly captures the tension between humanity and the natural world. His photographs explore how people adapt to the forces of nature both great and small, even within the confines of their own backyards.

The exhibition was organized by John Rohrbach, senior curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Toby Jurovics, curator of photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is the coordinating curator in Washington, D.C.

"Gohlke’s photographs are part of a complex dialogue about our reconciliation with the modern landscape, exploring the ways Americans build their lives in a natural world that rarely fits within a traditional pastoral ideal," said Jurovics. "While the austerity of his photographs at first suggests a coolness or remove, his intent is in fact the opposite—to express a personal and emotional connection to place. His photographs speak with a powerful and deeply affecting resonance that is certain to appeal to the wide range of audiences at the Smithsonian American Art Museum."

Gohlke’s photographs are quiet, spare and elegant, inspired by the directness of their subjects. He has sought to describe the urban, suburban and rural places familiar in everyday lives rather than romanticized views of wilderness landscapes. "Accommodating Nature" begins with Gohlke’s early photographic explorations of his Wichita Falls childhood—his grandparents’ ranch, his suburban home, the architecture of his community—followed by architectural and landscape photographs he made across the Midwest from Minnesota to New Mexico.

The heart of the exhibition contextualizes two of Gohlke’s most heralded and compelling projects: his depictions of destruction and rebuilding following a devastating tornado that struck Wichita Falls in 1979 and his multiyear investigation of the effects of the massive volcanic explosion at Mount. St. Helens in 1980. These photographs capture how people cope with nature’s unpredictability and raise provocative questions about humanity’s compulsion to continuously reassert itself by focusing on renewal and regrowth rather than on disaster.

A group of oversized color photographs of the Sudbury River in Massachusetts, created between 1989 and 1992, eloquently capture the disconnect between the ideal of a bucolic, pastoral New England and the reality and complexity of an overtaxed river that has been taken for granted. Photographs from commissions and grants from Mississippi to Queens draw attention to people’s active accommodation to nature across wide stretches of the country, in both rural and urban settings.

Gohlke’s art is deeply informed by the climate of North Texas, a land of steady wind, where hot summers and cold winters are punctuated by torrential spring thunderstorms, hail and tornadoes. His pictures take empathetic and, at times, wry visual note of people’s interactions with a natural world that rarely meets their ideals and expectations. Gohlke concluded that he should not be required to go to places of astonishing natural beauty—like those depicted in the work of Ansel Adams—to take landscape pictures. "I’m more interested in what’s outside my door," he said.

His photographs came to notice in the landmark 1975 exhibition "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., which redefined how American photographers responded to contemporary landscape. Other photographers featured in this exhibition were Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon and Stephen Shore.

Gohlke received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in English literature in 1964 and a master’s degree in English from Yale University in 1966. While at Yale, Gohlke met Walker Evans; following graduation, he studied privately with Paul Caponigro.

He has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art, the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley College, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the universities of Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Since September 2007, he has been laureate professor of photography at the University of Arizona and senior research fellow at the Center for Creative Photography, both in Tucson, Ariz.

Gohlke is represented in many private and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the George Eastman House, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1975 and 1984 and was awarded a fellowship twice from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum celebrates the vision and creativity of Americans with approximately 41,500 artworks in all media spanning more than three centuries. Its National Historic Landmark building is located at Eighth and F streets N.W., above the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail station. Museum hours are 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, except Dec. 25. Admission is free. Smithsonian information: (202) 633-1000; (202) 633-5285 (TTY). Museum information (recorded): (202) 633-7970. Web site: www.americanart.si.edu