John Gossage Should Nature Change
Artist's Statement
Everyone everywhere now has a small thing that has changed for them. The big things, those things that always happen to someone else, the other people, the ones on the news. The earthquakes, the floods, the fires, the disasters, are all still there in their grand scale. But it’s that the birds that used to come to your backyard are no longer there is what keeps you up at night.
What I have been photographing for my next book, are moments when the normal slips, and the disorder starts. Subtle things that whisper to you that things have started to change and in all likelihood not for the best. Nature looks slightly different, it’s a bit warmer, there is a fire at the edge of town, a few of the people much younger than you have a different look in their eyes — remember the dinosaurs?
Black and white pictures of the country I come from and at this point in my life, work to understand.
The Times They Are A-Changin when I was younger I thought that song was about something different.
About the photographer
1946, New York, United States
American
Washington, United States
About John Gossage
John Gossage photographs have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past 49 years. His many one-person exhibitions have included The Better Neighborhoods of Greater Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Wahington, DC; 1976; Gardens, Leo Castelli Gallery, NYC, 1978; Photographs of Berlin, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1989; LAMF, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1990; One Work in 39 Parts, The Saint Louis Museum of Art, 1994; There and Gone, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 1998; The Romance Industry, Comune di Venezia, Venice, 2003; Berlin in the Time of the Wall, Gallerie Zulauf, Freinsheim, 2005: and The Pond, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, 2001. Three Routines, Art Institute of Chicago, 2014.
John Gossage is regarded as one of the finest American photobook-makers of the last 40 years. His first monograph, The Pond (1985), has just been republished to great acclaim, and other notable works include Stadt Des Schwarz (1987); LAMF (1987); There and Gone (1997); The Things That Animals Care About (1998); Hey Fuckface (2000); Snake Eyes (2002); Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004); Putting Back the Wall (2007); The Secrets of Real Estate (2008); and The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler/Map of Babylon (2010); The Code ( 2011); She Called Me by Name (2012); The Actor (2011): Who Do You Love (2014) Nothing (2014); pomodoii a grappolo (2015)
In 2002, Gossage started his own publishing company, Loosestrife Editions, which has published a number of photographic monographs to great acclaim.
John Gossage is represented by the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA. He was the recipiant of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. His work is represented in major public and private collections, including The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; The Saint Louis Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Center For Creative Photography, Tucson; The Sprengel Museum Hannover,; The National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC;
The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Museum of Modern Art, New York;
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; The
San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; The Palazzo Fortuny, Venice; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Disorder Shortlist
Valérie Belin, Still Life, 2014
Ilit Azoulay, Imaginary Order, 2012-2014
Matthew Brandt, Honeybees, 2009-2012
Maxim Dondyuk, Culture of the Confrontation, 2014
Alixandra Fazzina, A Million Shillings – Escape from Somalia, 2008
Ori Gersht, Blow Up, 2009
John Gossage, Should Nature Change, 2010-2014
Pieter Hugo, Permanent Error, 2009-2010
Gideon Mendel, Drowning World, 2008-2014
Sophie Ristelhueber, Eleven Blowups, 2006
Brent Stirton, A Violation of Eden, 2007-2014
Yang Yongliang, Artificial Wonderland, 2014