Steidl has just published Landscape as Longing, a book of photographs by Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld made in Queens neighborhoods in New York between 2003 and 2004. The title immediately evokes the idea of desire and expectation tinged with nostalgia, and seems to suggest a definition and a method: landscape as a form of wistful anticipation.
Gohlke and Sternfeld’s book is not, contrary to what one might expect, a celebration of multiethnic and multicultural Queens, and if there is a hint of journalism it is only in the style which occasionally draws on documentary photography. The views are captured with sober precision, with no aestheticization, if not for the fact that the whole is bathed in the same summer light. There is nothing excessive about them, either: Gohlke and Sternfeld’s Queens is a rather sad looking suburb, filled with parking lots, empty streets, garish store fronts, and highways; it’s an amalgam, devoid of coherence or cohesion, of industrial zones, no-man’s lands, natural areas, and residential lots. Landscape as Longing is not a naïve celebration, and the photographs show remarkable maturity. The images possess beauty that goes beyond technical and photographic skill, as well as beyond the stereotypes often associated with Queens: Gohlke and Sternfeld’s approach is more specifically poetic.
Landscape as Longing is like a voyage of initiation: it’s a summer stroll through the drab happiness of a suburb; it’s also a discrete, almost timid, way of taking photographs. Ultimately, it’s a book about the very gesture of photography as a nostalgic desire for the image—the image one hopes to take and the image already taken.
Hugo Fortin
Hugo Fortin is a New York based writer specializing in photography.
Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld, Landscape as Longing: Queens, New York
Published by Steidl
US$ 75.00 / € 65.00 / CDN$ 90.00
