John Gossage - "The 32" Ruler, Map of Babylon"

I just received John Gossage's book, The 32" Ruler, Map of Babylon, in the mail last week. I have been waiting a while to get this for whatever reason, and finally decided to commit to it. John Gossage (b. 1946) is a fairly renowned photographer from Washington, D.C., most famous for his work entitled The Pond, which was first published in 1985. These arguably mundane photographs of a small, now nonexistent pond in southern Maryland, gained national and international attention as portraying in some way modern man's lack distance from nature. This may be true, but the photographs, which were on exhibition last Fall at the Smithsonian American Art Musuem, were more influential to me from a photographer's standpoint. What I mean by this is I was more influenced by the way in which he photographed these things rather than what it is he was photographing. This still holds true today, as I have been flipping through his recent work.

Here is an image from The Pond:

I have been highly influenced by his recent work in The 32" Ruler, for many reasons. The neighborhood, Kalorama, in which he took these photographs, is near where I lived in Adams Morgan last year. I even ran into John Gossage at Mixtec, a mexican restaurant on 18th street, but was too intimidated to say anything. In retrospect, this was a poor decision. Continuing, I enjoy the work in this series for it's "honesty", in the way that they are very mundane moments that when pieced together create a powerful, thought provoking story.

Here are a few images from The 32" Ruler.

This publication contains two of his recent series, these next images are from the second series of work entitled, Map of Babylon. He describes these images as simply aesthetic and without meaning. I enjoy these photographs, I'm going to make the assumption that you have to already be an extremely renowned and successful artist to release a series of work based on the fact that they are aesthetically pleasing.

Sorry for the long post, I've been pretty excited about his work since I've received this book.

Here is a link to an article about him in the City Paper.