The POND is a body of work – vintage silver print photographs taken around and away from a muddy pond situated in an unkempt, wooded area behind a shopping center in Queenstown, Md. It was considered groundbreaking when first published in 1985, and remains one of the most important photobooks of the “New Topographics” mode, which includes Robert Adams’s The New West, Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, and Lewis Baltz’s The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California.

The images present a foil to Henry David Thoreau’s stay at Walden. They do not aspire to the "beauty" of classical landscapes in the tradition of Ansel Adams; instead, Gossage depicts nature in full splendor, ambiguous and evocative, yet at odds with both itself and humankind. Robert Adams described the work as “believable because it includes evidence of man’s darkness of spirit, memorable for the intense fondness [Gossage] shows for the remains of the natural world.” 

The opening reception, with the artist, is on Friday, April 13, from 5 to 8 pm. Stephen DaiterGallery, 230 West Superior, 4^th floor, Chicago, IL. The exhibition runs through June 23.

John Gossage (born 1946) photographs places and sites that tell an every day story: paths worn through abanconed tracts of land, corners wehre debris collects, markings on a wall, a table after a meal. Gossage photographs that which has just occurred to remind us that we may have alredy forgotten it happened or that we were there. By asking us to look at what we have misplaced or abandoned he brings us face to face with the present as it becomes history. He is known for his artists’ books under the imprint Loosetrife Editions and his photobooks, There and Gone (NazraeliPress1997); Berlin in the Time of the Wall (Loosetrife 2004); The Pond (Aperture 2010) and The Thirty-Two Inch Ruler (Steidl 2010). More about The Pond. Gossage studied briefly Lisette Model and Alexey Brodovitch in the 1960s and has exhibited worldwide. He has produced seventeen books and boxes on specific bodies of work and his photographs are held in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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