John Gossage's The Pond @ Smithsonian American Art Museum
John Gossage, Untitled. From The Pond, 1985. Gelatin silver print. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of anonymous donors.
In the early 1980s, John Gossage photographed a small pond on his commute between Washington and Queenstown, Maryland. Or so goes the story. These images went into his first and now classic book, The Pond, and are gathered for the first time in a gallery setting at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The handsome volume was first released in 1985 by Aperture, and is slated for re-release later this month.
The curators place Gossage's work in the context of surveys created by the photographers of the New Topographics school in the 70s -- those like Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, who took in the the American landscape, not with an eye to the majesty of nature, but with a gimlet-eyed lens on its fragility; and also in the context of Ed Ruscha's dead-pan surveys like Twenty-six Gasoline Stations or Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
The Pond naturally resonates with Walden (Gossage came to Washington at the age of nineteen to attend the Walden School), but is of course far from idyllic. The peripatetic photographer veers off the road onto a dirt path (the book's first image) and follows it around the pond. Moments of sylvan tranquility are easily broken with a glance through anemic woods towards carnival rides and industrial structures in the near distance. The path and pond is strewn with cultural detritus: discarded automobile tires, receipts, a Mountain Dew can.
John Gossage, Untitled. From The Pond, 1985. Gelatin silver print. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of anonymous donors.
One glowing wooded path recalls a photo by W. Eugene Smith, who taught Gossage how to print. In 1946, Smith had just documented some of the horrors of Word War II, and "needed to make a photograph that was the opposite of war." The iconic photo that resulted, "The Walk to Paradise Garden," can be seen as an image of youth at the precipice of a great adventure. But if Gossage's bleak suburban landscape already feels vaguely sinister, this resonance makes it even more so, as that precipice is now child-free: where did they go? In times of peace, is there still something lurking in the woods? In the book, this image is followed by a skyscape filled with birds out of formation -- not quite a grace note as the curators text would have it.
In a recent interview with Smithsonian magazine, Gossage reflected on where he's come from since The Pond's first release. He's open to the idea of viewers wandering into the gallery and taking in the body of work without the narrative laid out in the book. Gossage told the Washington City Paper, "I'm interested in finding the exceptional in the ordinary," but the work needs the photographer's narrative eye to truly take shape. The Pond is an intriguing gallery show, but it's an even better book.
Gossage was kind enough to answer a few questions.
Have you returned to the site of The Pond?
There is no site of The Pond, really. The site of the pond is everywhere -- there are three pictures in the book that were taken in Berlin. It's supposed to be a coherent landscape, but about halfway through the project I sort of got the vision, you know: this is a work of fiction built on fact. As long as there's a plausibility between the covers, there's no particular reason [for the photos to be of the same place] -- I'm not documenting a locale. It's an almost archetypal locale.
You've said that "the world suggests far more subtle and interesting variations than I could ever come up with." Do you think people who come to The Pond galleries without knowing the book might find something in it that you didn't?
I found things! I never did a show of the pictures when the book came out. I was showing with [New York gallery owner] Leo Castelli back then and they wanted to do a show, but I wanted it very much to be a book as an independent artwork. This is the first time I'd ever seen them all on the wall and it was actually new to me. I mean, it's old work and I obviously know it well, but I was surprised that I liked the show. I was like, 'Gee, if I walked into this I'd find this interesting!' Anyway, things change. One thing is not a souvenir of the other -- they're two different methods, if you will.
In your teens you worked as a commercial photographer. How did you move on from that to find your voice as an artist?
I had my first professional assignment for a newspaper on Staten Island, where I was born, when I was fourteen. So it was really since forever that I wanted to be a photographer. And there wasn't any art scene for photography. Basically all you had was some shows at the Museum of Modern Art. There were no commercial galleries that showed photography. What you did was you did your magazine work, and then you did "personal work." One of the great bits of advice I ever had when I was about seventeen or eighteen. I was friends with photographer Diane Arbus. We did an issue of Esquire together -- she was doing one story and I was doing a story -- actually on the high school I was thrown out of. And she took me aside and took me out for coffee and she said, "John, I want to give you some advice."
To paraphrase, she had started early on with her husband Allan as a commercial photographer and she felt that she wasted so many years taking pictures the way other people wanted her to take pictures. And she told me, "You know I really like your pictures, but at this young age if you just work for magazines and let other people tell you what to do...at the very least you lose years of your life finding your own voice. You're too young to do this -- you're not formed enough as an artist to fight this off." Arbus was one of the smartest people I ever met. They were terrified of her at Esquire -- she was smarter than they were. And it was very good advice. Within a year I came down [to Washington] to this Ford Foundation funded school, The Walden School, which had fifteen students and five teachers. And at that point I quit magazine photography. I got really extreme as eighteen-year olds will do, and said I'm not going to photograph anything outside of my life: my friends, what I do, sort of diary kind of photography. I'd take no assignments -- though for an eighteen-year old I'd made plenty of money by that time. And obviously somebody would make a book called The Pond if they went to a school named Walden wouldn't they?
Are you still shooting in the D.C. area and are there any places that inspire you?
Yeah. Actually I have six books coming up, three are already done. The book I just did for Steidl is called The 32-inch Ruler/Map of Babylon -- it's two books in one. The 32-inch Ruler section is about my neighborhood in Kalorama. It's a project I did because I discovered soon after 9/11 that Donald Rumsfeld was my neighbor. And I realized I lived next to the center of all evil. I also have books on two very different areas of DC coming out.
Can you tell me a little bit about America 2006, the book you did with Martin Parr credited under the names "Obvious and Ordinary"?
Well obviously, you can tell by the book -- I didn't do it.
You really didn't do it?
Of course. Would I lie to you?
You wouldn't! I've seen it credited to you and Martin Parr.
I would believe it too, because obviously there's no inaccurate information on the internet. I never said I did it. Even though the BBC does have footage of Martin and I driving around those neighborhoods in Memphis and Mississippi [Ed. note: they were visiting William Eggleston], it could have been made by other people! It was just circumstance that we happened to be around the same place.
Well thanks very much for your time, I really appreciate it!
[Laughing] Hey, you have to get used to these Washington D.C. interviews. They tell you the truth!
[Laughs] Do you have anything else you'd like to add?
I've never had sex with that woman.
John Gossage: The Pond can be seen on the 2nd Floor South of the Smithsonian American Art Museum through January 17, 2011. On Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 7 p.m., join the artist and curator Toby Jurovics in the McEvoy Auditorium for a conversation about The Pond and its role in the history of American landscape photography.