Should Nature Change – John Gossage

In John Gossage’s words, this is a book “with a particular context, of photographs to settle the feeling that I did not understand my home. To do that I set out, starting in 2003, to see what clarity my pictures might bring.” And so came into being these photos of scenes, things, minor events and the look in the eyes of the young, all taken in everyday non-iconic places throughout his travels across America. “Should Nature Change,” taken from the Book of Isaiah, is for Gossage both a declaration and a warning: “I am a humanist, like most of us are, I can’t really step back to see the beauty and order of all this; closeness brings chaos and dread in this case. We have done harm to the place we live, I’m told, but it seems to me that we have done the most harm to ourselves and our best-laid plans. The planet has a plan to fix this if we don’t.” 

About the Author

John Gossage, born in New York in 1946 and now residing in Washington, D.C., studied with Lisette Model and Alexey Brodovitch in 1960–61. In the late 1960s, he learned Telecaster guitar from Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton, leaving professional music in 1973 to return to photography.
John Gossage left school early and at the age of 16, he began to contribute full time to magazines such as Look, Newsweek, and Esquire. Meanwhile, he honed his photographic skills: student of Bruce Davidson, he met also Diane Arbus, who encouraged him to leave the commercial scene. He moved to Washington to attend the experimental Walden school and there devote his time entirely to his own personal research.

Gossage focused his photography on the cultural and political dimension of the landscape, exploring areas around urban territories and grasping the traces left there by man. Dealing with themes such as surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power, his photographs highlight the growing fragility of the world, often best presented as artist’s book or other forms of publication. The major production of books for which he is known to this day testifies the evolution of an articulate research project on the relationship between man and the landscape, switching from the theme of pollution to the examination of the ways in which power exploits images of the landscape, from the reflection of the relationship between places and memories, to the series of photographs of his neighborhood.
Between 1974 and 1990 Gossage exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York; since 1990 he has concentrated almost exclusively on publications, producing over 20 titles. His books with Steidl include The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler (2010), Looking up Ben James – A Fable (2018) and Should Nature Change (2019).