Etherton Gallery is pleased to present Alternative Views, a new exhibition bringing together the work of two acclaimed American photographers, Jason Lee and Frank Gohlke. Rarely shown in dialogue, their photographs offer distinct yet complementary perspectives on the American landscape, revealing its capacity to hold both fleeting moments and layered histories shaped by time.

Jason Lee’s work emerges from extensive road trips across the American West and Southwest. His photographs uncover overlooked, incongruous, and often quietly ironic scenes encountered along highways, in small towns, and within rural communities. Working in both black and white and color, Lee approaches the landscape with a cinematic sensibility, shaped by the visual language of American independent cinema and the cool observational stance of postwar landscape photography. His images capture the immediacy of chance encounters while suggesting broader cultural shifts unfolding at the margins of everyday life.

Frank Gohlke, by contrast, is known for his sustained and rigorous attention to place. Over a career spanning nearly five decades, Gohlke has photographed grain elevators in the Midwest, the aftermath of natural disasters, agricultural landscapes, and the gradual transformations of environments shaped by both human activity and natural forces. A key figure in the landmark 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, Gohlke helped redefine landscape photography, moving it away from heroic vistas toward a direct, unsentimental engagement with the built and altered world.

Seen together, Lee and Gohlke demonstrate how the American landscape can be understood through radically different temporal approaches: the single, arresting moment and the accumulated meaning revealed through prolonged observation. Alternative Views includes a selection of Gohlke’s photographs from the 1970s—grain elevators beneath vast Midwestern skies, early images of Wichita Falls, Texas, and understated urban and suburban scenes from Los Angeles and St. Paul—alongside Lee’s photographs from his travels through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas.

While separated by generation, the two artists are linked by a shared photographic lineage. Gohlke’s participation in New Topographics situates him at the foundation of a movement that also included Henry Wessel, whose work has been a significant influence on Lee. Both photographers approach the postwar American landscape—its highways, parking lots, industrial sites, and small towns—with clarity, restraint, and an acute awareness of visual nuance.

Alternative Views brings these two bodies of work into conversation around ecological concerns, economic change, and the enduring consequences of human presence on the land. Gohlke’s plainspoken images reveal the long-term effects of human decisions, encouraging a sense of responsibility toward the environment, while Lee’s photographs pause on scenes we often pass without noticing, evoking a quiet sense of loss and remembrance. Together, their work invites viewers to reconsider how landscapes are shaped, inhabited, and remembered—and to reflect on our shared responsibility as stewards of place.

About the Authors

Jason Lee (American, b. 1970, Orange, California) is a photographer, director, and actor. Raised in Southern California, Lee first gained prominence as a professional skateboarder during the late 1980s and early 1990s before pursuing a successful career in film, television, and voiceover, working with directors including Kevin Smith, Lawrence Kasdan, Cameron Crowe, and Rebecca Miller. In 2001, he turned his focus to photography, committing to the medium as his primary creative practice. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, magazines, and books. His first official monograph, A Plain View (2018), was also the debut publication of Film Photographic, the independent imprint he founded in 2015. Subsequent publications include In the Gold Dust Rush (Stanley/Barker, 2020) and Galveston (2021), among others. In 2019, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa presented OK: Jason Lee Photographs, his first museum exhibition.