FG: In 1979, Wayne invited me to Fargo-Moorhead to give a photography workshop at the Creative Arts Studio that he and his wife Jane were directing in conjunction with the Fargo public schools.
BL: Where did Wayne himself grow up?
FG: In Moorhead.
BL: Where does the connection with Iceland come in?
FG: His grandparents were Icelandic. They lived in a largely Icelandic community in the small farming town of Mountain, North Dakota, named for a conspicuous discontinuity in the landscape.
BL: His parents had left their parents’ farms and gone to the cities for other careers, but he remained in contact with his grandparents?
FG: His family went out there a lot. He would tell me about going to reunions and celebrations in Mountain. It took him a long time to realize that hearing the old men reciting poetry in Icelandic was really something, that not everybody grows up like that. It takes everyone time to grow into possession of their particular heritage. Some people just don’t care and don’t do anything with the knowledge. Even if you care, instinctively it takes time to create your own relationship to it out of your past experience; there is a certain amount of processing and memory that has to go on. The connection of your memories to your current experience is a fascinating process. Someone like Wayne in his work gives you a way to follow that process without necessarily understanding that that’s what you’re doing.
BL: The work transmutes or transforms a feeling that began in early childhood, which Wayne Gudmundson processed later in life. He recognizes that he experienced his heritage while growing up, which is one thing, and then established his relationship to it, which is another. Although all of that might sound like an intellectual or an existential process, it is also without question a process of feelings. If the person’s feelings are strong enough to demand expression, they demand expression. From that point, there are many different forms that expression can take. It could be that every year we will read poetry or the sagas, and I want you, my children, to understand them. It could go no further than that. Or, for somebody else—man or woman—it could be a way of cooking every so often, and for somebody else it could be stories shared with friends, or a version of those poetry readings, read in your native language. Or those feelings could find form in the visual construct we call a picture.
FG: Wayne’s photography seems to me the distillation of a relationship to landscape that I think he grew into. It was in him, it was a part of him, but it took a certain amount of maturity to grow into his work. The landscape was clearly something that deeply engaged him for reasons he couldn’t entirely identify— probably none of us ever can. He recalls that one of the high points of visits to Mountain was when his grandfather would take them to the top of the hill in the car or truck, and they would coast down and see how far out into the fields or the flat part of the landscape they could go. It was thrilling, and every time they wondered, How far are we going to go this time? The connection to the landscape was as intimately and unconsciously felt as the pull of gravity. I think that’s one of the things I admire about Wayne’s pictures. When he’s really operating at peak, they’re thoughtless in the best way. That is, they draw in all the thinking he’s ever done, but at the same time they’re as natural and inevitable as gravity.
BL: To my eye and to my feelings, they also have something about that coasting into the landscape about them. You are far away from it and yet it’s pulling you in. And often there is a road in the middle down which you are going to go. Because he is a photographer and not coasting in the car, the land is there to either side and it’s important. We’re not coasting, we’re looking, and the pull is there.
FG: The pull is there.
BL: I noticed that in Wayne’s earliest work there are some similarities to the very highly structured nineteenth-century French photography, particularly the work of Baldus.1 Photographs as they should be. Gudmundson’s is a whole different tradition about a whole different kind of landscape, but like Baldus in the south of France, he photographed the place the way it was. And Wayne found a voice somewhere that organized itself. These photographs are about an expanse that Baldus, who liked expanses, had never seen; we don’t know how he would have organized it. But there is something intangible in the empty landscapes that attracts Wayne, and that would have permitted Baldus to organize North Dakota or Iceland the way he organized the floods of the Rhône in 1856 for the French government.
FG: A flood and the visual experience of the flood—the way it obscures the ordinarily seen features of the landscape—were things within Baldus’s experience. But it’s understood that all of those ordinary features, be they human artifacts or the underlying terrain, are still there. In Wayne’s work, it’s as if, instead of water, he’s got the North Dakota plain on top of the culture that he understands and lives and breathes. And it’s not outlandish or bizarre, it’s just another state in which that familiar set of surroundings can exist. Whereas, I think North Dakota would have flummoxed Baldus entirely, because there would be nothing underneath the plain for him except geology, and much of that would be hidden so deep that without the intellectual equipment of a geologist it wouldn’t have any effect on his understanding.
BL: Gudmundson organizes what he knows and he organizes it as it is. There are very few photographs in which you feel that he has forced an organization upon the land. Even though we know that for it to be a picture he has to have organized the material, he has enough trust in himself to let it appear untampered with and unorganized. You have to be really sure of yourself to know that what you’re putting into that rectangle is, on the one hand, true to the place and, on the other hand, makes a picture. You have to believe in the second part really hard.
FG: The real test comes when you’re confronted with something that calls on your understanding as a native of the place, with an emotional attachment to it and awareness of its organization, that leads you to make a picture that doesn’t look like any you’ve seen before. It doesn’t look like a picture, but it’s the only way to respond to what you’re seeing. So you have to believe it. You have to believe in the truth of your understanding and in the capacity of your viewers to read the implicit cues. And you have to trust in the seamlessness of appearances to create a feeling of organization and intentionality rather than just a random sampling of all that’s out there.
* * *
FG: In 1997, Wayne and the Icelandic photographer Gu›mundur Ingólfsson collaborated on an exhibition exchange and the accompanying book, Heimahagar–Homeplaces. Ingólfsson came to North Dakota and photographed places where Icelandic settlers had clustered, and Wayne went to Iceland and photographed where his forbears came from.
BL: You’ve described “the pull” on Gudmundson of this land he had never seen, where he not could but had to go.
FG: Something would be incomplete without having seen it. It seems to me that Wayne in those years was working on understanding in a visceral way the relationship between history and landscape, as well as his own heritage as the grandson of immigrants. There is something about migration restlessness, a kind of provisional relationship to the land that lies behind some of these pictures. The Dakotas, the Great Plains, make people feel very small. I think the best introduction to Wayne’s work for someone who has no experience of those kinds of spaces might be Giants in the Earth by Ole Rølvaag.2 The people in that novel are Norwegians, whose culture has not equipped them with the psychological strength necessary to assert themselves against this vastness and its indifference to human concerns. It’s a very tragic book. Another good introduction would be the opening of My Antonia by Willa Cather,3 in which a boy from the city or the east . . .
BL: . . . comes out to Nebraska . . .
FG: . . . and is picked up by his uncle, I think, and taken in.
BL: It’s one of the most vivid moments in American literature. Charles Olson4 argues that the vastness of the North American continent is one of the determining factors of what we would call the American experience. He claims that there are two basic responses to being here—one is to hold on like a tent stake and the other is to ride out into it. And then he says, “Poe dug in and Melville mounted.”
BL: Gudmundson seems to have mounted.
FG: In some of his pictures he digs in, unearthing relationships that are laid out like a town built on a grid. People build things in predictable relationship to other things. So the armatures of a picture pre-exist.
BL: But leave that town behind, get to the edge, and then cross out into the countryside, and the grid isn’t there.
FG: Well, it is, but it’s on such a scale that an individual walking or even riding a horse is out of sight of it most of the time. In a car you can be as aware of it as you want to because you are always coming to the section corners. The whole area is on a mile-square grid. It’s not marked everywhere by roads, but it is anywhere that it’s flat enough for roads to run without having to cross streams or whatever. It’s there, but even in a car, if you stop in the middle of a section and get out and walk, you lose sight of it. It’s only theoretical that there’s an overlay.
BL: All there really is, is experience right in front of you. It doesn’t have any obvious edges.
FG: One reason for the persistence of the road as a motif in these pictures is that, for most people, it is the way in and the way out. Wayne is often photographing at a vantage point from which the road disappears in the middle ground. In the case of his irrigation works pictures,5 there isn’t really a road but a spillway that functions as a road before it just stops. The experience of going down that pathway and then suddenly finding it gone is like wandering off the road out there in the wintertime. Even though you know that the road is right behind you, it’s very disconcerting, because there’s nothing between you and the North Pole—which you know is an inhospitable place!
BL: These pictures present two kinds of experiences that are disconcerting with respect to making pictures and your preconception of their probable success. One of them comes from including the road, which introduces a very strong one-point perspective. If not carefully combated, this can eliminate your perception of the two sides of the picture.
FG: And essentially render them irrelevant.
BL: Irrelevant. Invisible. And the other is not having the road but just the expanse, which gives you the problem of not having much with which to structure your picture except the horizon. Your horizontal top band and your horizontal bottom band are going to be rich and full. But still you have to know what you are doing in order to make the conversation between sky and earth a visual one. I look at these photographs and think of a very interesting painting by Winslow Homer at the Yale Art Gallery, of two trappers in a winter landscape.6 You see them from behind, knee-deep in the snow. They are toward the middle of the picture with a lot of snow beneath them. The painting has very little detailing, yet there are subtle gradations of the white and gray tones that give you almost imperceptible triangles that hold the picture together. Some of Wayne’s pictures take the same risk of appearing to do without the structural unit of elements that will hold up the edifice, and yet they are there and the edifice holds. Gudmundson persuades you that if you were out there without the road . . .
FG: . . . there would still be someplace to stand.
BL: These are interesting pictures. Wayne Gudmundson’s artistic hunch then takes him to Iceland, which has something to do, if not with an ancient knowledge, then at least with three generations of knowledge of his people on this vastness called the American plains. He asks himself, Is there another kind of photograph that can be made about these people, my people, in the other kind of vastness from which they came, which in part determined their choice of this one? So off he goes to Iceland, because he has a hunch that there is yet another version of his picture that he can’t make in North Dakota. It has to be close to the source. The photographs are his way of dealing with his heritage, his experience, his whole way of growing up. All of his feelings have come out in these pictures that are so spare-looking, rigorously made so as to not overstate the experience.
FG: Absolutely.
BL: So courageous in their way. He’s not going to lie. It would have been easy, for example, to photograph the one-walled school in Verendrye from a slightly oblique angle so that it would have looked like a Hollywood flat set.
FG: Like Arbus’s Hollywood façade braced from behind, against a magnificent sky, almost as if ordered by the art director.7
BL: Her picture was right there for him to do it.
FG: But he chose not to.
BL: His could have been full of a certain kind of mockery that Arbus certainly put in hers, but he did the opposite.
FG: Standing exactly far enough away so that you have to look into the picture to realize what that white in the windows means.
BL: What it is. What it represents.
FG: With Verendrye, I have the urge to go up and see what would happen if you opened the door. By keeping it way back here, Wayne leaves us with the urge alone, which you can follow only in your imagination and your feelings.
BL: He is an artist who is continuously seeking and often finding the place where observation and perception intersect without either one disturbing or belying the other one. You see a schoolhouse or a landscape from a distance, and it appears to be at the distance from which he saw it originally. Yet, as you look, you realize he could not have seen all its subtle details from that position. Nature doesn’t organize itself entirely like that. André Kertész8 said to me once, when we were talking about his pictures, “I don’t do anything, I do very little. Nature begins the thing. I complete it, that’s all.” I played dumb and said, “Begins what?” He looked at me as if he were talking to a child, and said, “The picture! What else?!” And that’s what is going on here with Gudmundson’s work; the world began that picture with the school wall. He had to complete it in a way that was true to the way nature began it and was also true to the nature of pictures. In some lucky cases, you see it right then, but sometimes you have to work like a dog, and forty-five minutes to an hour later you find that place where you can put the tripod down and it looks innocent. That is to say, as unintentional and unsullied by man’s perception as it did when you first saw it, but with all the strength and impact of the thing that made you say, “Oh, oh my, wow!”
FG: Sometimes you find the subject, but it’s not a picture.
BL: And there are so many places where it is a picture but not the subject. He’s out there in the cold, naked in the cold, with nothing around him but a road to tell him how to get back. If more people understood that this is the nature of this kind of art, and by and large of all kinds of art, pictures like these would have greater impact. As James Agee says in the introduction to Helen Levitt’s book A Way of Seeing: “It would help heal us.”9 In Wayne Gudmundson’s case, it’s really healing us of a lot of very toxic miscomprehensions about what we think the world has to be like in order to enable us to feel things.
FG: In order to nourish us.
BL: There are a lot of toxic miscomprehensions. Suzanne Langer calls it the “madhouse of too much art,”10 which we wouldn’t tolerate so easily if people understood what it took to make pictures like Gudmundson’s. I tell you, he’s doing a good job.
FG: Verendrye is indicative of what he is so wonderful at doing, which is to find exactly the distance from the things that move and draw him that allows us to feel the attraction, to recognize what we are looking at without fully satisfying our curiosity.
BL: How so?
FG: What he presents us with is a way in which the world can renew itself by not being too thoroughly consumed.
BL: Where there’s room for us to enter that world, there’s the possibility that it can enter our imaginations, and then our imaginations can dwell on it, and move through it in ways other than Gudmundson’s because he is not we, we are not he. You are absolutely right.
1 Édouard-Denis Baldus (1815–1882), French-German photographer who specialized in landscapes, architecture, and railroads.
2 Ole Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth, Eng. trans. (New York, 1927).
3 Willa Cather, My Antonia (New York, 1918).
4 Charles Olson (1910–1970), American poet and critic.
5 See Wayne Gudmundson and Robert Silberman, The Promise of Water: The Garrison Diversion Project (Fargo, 2002).
6 Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Below Zero, 1894, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery.
7 Diane Arbus, A House on a Hill, Hollywood, Cal., 1963, gelatin silver print.
8 André Kertész (1894–1985), Hungarian-American photographer.
9 Helen Levitt, A Way of Seeing (1946; New York, 1965). Levitt (b. 1918), American photographer acclaimed for her work photographing NewYork City in the 1930s and ’40s.
10 Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), 53–54.
Frank Gohlke and Ben Lifson: A Conversation
BL: When did you meet Wayne Gudmundson?
FG: In 1979, Wayne invited me to Fargo-Moorhead to give a photography workshop at the Creative Arts Studio that he and his wife Jane were directing in conjunction with the Fargo public schools.
BL: Where did Wayne himself grow up?
FG: In Moorhead.
BL: Where does the connection with Iceland come in?
FG: His grandparents were Icelandic. They lived in a largely Icelandic community in the small farming town of Mountain, North Dakota, named for a conspicuous discontinuity in the landscape.
BL: His parents had left their parents’ farms and gone to the cities for other careers, but he remained in contact with his grandparents?
FG: His family went out there a lot. He would tell me about going to reunions and celebrations in Mountain. It took him a long time to realize that hearing the old men reciting poetry in Icelandic was really something, that not everybody grows up like that. It takes everyone time to grow into possession of their particular heritage. Some people just don’t care and don’t do anything with the knowledge. Even if you care, instinctively it takes time to create your own relationship to it out of your past experience; there is a certain amount of processing and memory that has to go on. The connection of your memories to your current experience is a fascinating process. Someone like Wayne in his work gives you a way to follow that process without necessarily understanding that that’s what you’re doing.
BL: The work transmutes or transforms a feeling that began in early childhood, which Wayne Gudmundson processed later in life. He recognizes that he experienced his heritage while growing up, which is one thing, and then established his relationship to it, which is another. Although all of that might sound like an intellectual or an existential process, it is also without question a process of feelings. If the person’s feelings are strong enough to demand expression, they demand expression. From that point, there are many different forms that expression can take. It could be that every year we will read poetry or the sagas, and I want you, my children, to understand them. It could go no further than that. Or, for somebody else—man or woman—it could be a way of cooking every so often, and for somebody else it could be stories shared with friends, or a version of those poetry readings, read in your native language. Or those feelings could find form in the visual construct we call a picture.
FG: Wayne’s photography seems to me the distillation of a relationship to landscape that I think he grew into. It was in him, it was a part of him, but it took a certain amount of maturity to grow into his work. The landscape was clearly something that deeply engaged him for reasons he couldn’t entirely identify— probably none of us ever can. He recalls that one of the high points of visits to Mountain was when his grandfather would take them to the top of the hill in the car or truck, and they would coast down and see how far out into the fields or the flat part of the landscape they could go. It was thrilling, and every time they wondered, How far are we going to go this time? The connection to the landscape was as intimately and unconsciously felt as the pull of gravity. I think that’s one of the things I admire about Wayne’s pictures. When he’s really operating at peak, they’re thoughtless in the best way. That is, they draw in all the thinking he’s ever done, but at the same time they’re as natural and inevitable as gravity.
BL: To my eye and to my feelings, they also have something about that coasting into the landscape about them. You are far away from it and yet it’s pulling you in. And often there is a road in the middle down which you are going to go. Because he is a photographer and not coasting in the car, the land is there to either side and it’s important. We’re not coasting, we’re looking, and the pull is there.
FG: The pull is there.
BL: I noticed that in Wayne’s earliest work there are some similarities to the very highly structured nineteenth-century French photography, particularly the work of Baldus.1 Photographs as they should be. Gudmundson’s is a whole different tradition about a whole different kind of landscape, but like Baldus in the south of France, he photographed the place the way it was. And Wayne found a voice somewhere that organized itself. These photographs are about an expanse that Baldus, who liked expanses, had never seen; we don’t know how he would have organized it. But there is something intangible in the empty landscapes that attracts Wayne, and that would have permitted Baldus to organize North Dakota or Iceland the way he organized the floods of the Rhône in 1856 for the French government.
FG: A flood and the visual experience of the flood—the way it obscures the ordinarily seen features of the landscape—were things within Baldus’s experience. But it’s understood that all of those ordinary features, be they human artifacts or the underlying terrain, are still there. In Wayne’s work, it’s as if, instead of water, he’s got the North Dakota plain on top of the culture that he understands and lives and breathes. And it’s not outlandish or bizarre, it’s just another state in which that familiar set of surroundings can exist. Whereas, I think North Dakota would have flummoxed Baldus entirely, because there would be nothing underneath the plain for him except geology, and much of that would be hidden so deep that without the intellectual equipment of a geologist it wouldn’t have any effect on his understanding.
BL: Gudmundson organizes what he knows and he organizes it as it is. There are very few photographs in which you feel that he has forced an organization upon the land. Even though we know that for it to be a picture he has to have organized the material, he has enough trust in himself to let it appear untampered with and unorganized. You have to be really sure of yourself to know that what you’re putting into that rectangle is, on the one hand, true to the place and, on the other hand, makes a picture. You have to believe in the second part really hard.
FG: The real test comes when you’re confronted with something that calls on your understanding as a native of the place, with an emotional attachment to it and awareness of its organization, that leads you to make a picture that doesn’t look like any you’ve seen before. It doesn’t look like a picture, but it’s the only way to respond to what you’re seeing. So you have to believe it. You have to believe in the truth of your understanding and in the capacity of your viewers to read the implicit cues. And you have to trust in the seamlessness of appearances to create a feeling of organization and intentionality rather than just a random sampling of all that’s out there.
* * *
FG: In 1997, Wayne and the Icelandic photographer Gu›mundur Ingólfsson collaborated on an exhibition exchange and the accompanying book, Heimahagar–Homeplaces. Ingólfsson came to North Dakota and photographed places where Icelandic settlers had clustered, and Wayne went to Iceland and photographed where his forbears came from.
BL: You’ve described “the pull” on Gudmundson of this land he had never seen, where he not could but had to go.
FG: Something would be incomplete without having seen it. It seems to me that Wayne in those years was working on understanding in a visceral way the relationship between history and landscape, as well as his own heritage as the grandson of immigrants. There is something about migration restlessness, a kind of provisional relationship to the land that lies behind some of these pictures. The Dakotas, the Great Plains, make people feel very small. I think the best introduction to Wayne’s work for someone who has no experience of those kinds of spaces might be Giants in the Earth by Ole Rølvaag.2 The people in that novel are Norwegians, whose culture has not equipped them with the psychological strength necessary to assert themselves against this vastness and its indifference to human concerns. It’s a very tragic book. Another good introduction would be the opening of My Antonia by Willa Cather,3 in which a boy from the city or the east . . .
BL: . . . comes out to Nebraska . . .
FG: . . . and is picked up by his uncle, I think, and taken in.
BL: It’s one of the most vivid moments in American literature. Charles Olson4 argues that the vastness of the North American continent is one of the determining factors of what we would call the American experience. He claims that there are two basic responses to being here—one is to hold on like a tent stake and the other is to ride out into it. And then he says, “Poe dug in and Melville mounted.”
BL: Gudmundson seems to have mounted.
FG: In some of his pictures he digs in, unearthing relationships that are laid out like a town built on a grid. People build things in predictable relationship to other things. So the armatures of a picture pre-exist.
BL: But leave that town behind, get to the edge, and then cross out into the countryside, and the grid isn’t there.
FG: Well, it is, but it’s on such a scale that an individual walking or even riding a horse is out of sight of it most of the time. In a car you can be as aware of it as you want to because you are always coming to the section corners. The whole area is on a mile-square grid. It’s not marked everywhere by roads, but it is anywhere that it’s flat enough for roads to run without having to cross streams or whatever. It’s there, but even in a car, if you stop in the middle of a section and get out and walk, you lose sight of it. It’s only theoretical that there’s an overlay.
BL: All there really is, is experience right in front of you. It doesn’t have any obvious edges.
FG: One reason for the persistence of the road as a motif in these pictures is that, for most people, it is the way in and the way out. Wayne is often photographing at a vantage point from which the road disappears in the middle ground. In the case of his irrigation works pictures,5 there isn’t really a road but a spillway that functions as a road before it just stops. The experience of going down that pathway and then suddenly finding it gone is like wandering off the road out there in the wintertime. Even though you know that the road is right behind you, it’s very disconcerting, because there’s nothing between you and the North Pole—which you know is an inhospitable place!
BL: These pictures present two kinds of experiences that are disconcerting with respect to making pictures and your preconception of their probable success. One of them comes from including the road, which introduces a very strong one-point perspective. If not carefully combated, this can eliminate your perception of the two sides of the picture.
FG: And essentially render them irrelevant.
BL: Irrelevant. Invisible. And the other is not having the road but just the expanse, which gives you the problem of not having much with which to structure your picture except the horizon. Your horizontal top band and your horizontal bottom band are going to be rich and full. But still you have to know what you are doing in order to make the conversation between sky and earth a visual one. I look at these photographs and think of a very interesting painting by Winslow Homer at the Yale Art Gallery, of two trappers in a winter landscape.6 You see them from behind, knee-deep in the snow. They are toward the middle of the picture with a lot of snow beneath them. The painting has very little detailing, yet there are subtle gradations of the white and gray tones that give you almost imperceptible triangles that hold the picture together. Some of Wayne’s pictures take the same risk of appearing to do without the structural unit of elements that will hold up the edifice, and yet they are there and the edifice holds. Gudmundson persuades you that if you were out there without the road . . .
FG: . . . there would still be someplace to stand.
BL: These are interesting pictures. Wayne Gudmundson’s artistic hunch then takes him to Iceland, which has something to do, if not with an ancient knowledge, then at least with three generations of knowledge of his people on this vastness called the American plains. He asks himself, Is there another kind of photograph that can be made about these people, my people, in the other kind of vastness from which they came, which in part determined their choice of this one? So off he goes to Iceland, because he has a hunch that there is yet another version of his picture that he can’t make in North Dakota. It has to be close to the source. The photographs are his way of dealing with his heritage, his experience, his whole way of growing up. All of his feelings have come out in these pictures that are so spare-looking, rigorously made so as to not overstate the experience.
FG: Absolutely.
BL: So courageous in their way. He’s not going to lie. It would have been easy, for example, to photograph the one-walled school in Verendrye from a slightly oblique angle so that it would have looked like a Hollywood flat set.
FG: Like Arbus’s Hollywood façade braced from behind, against a magnificent sky, almost as if ordered by the art director.7
BL: Her picture was right there for him to do it.
FG: But he chose not to.
BL: His could have been full of a certain kind of mockery that Arbus certainly put in hers, but he did the opposite.
FG: Standing exactly far enough away so that you have to look into the picture to realize what that white in the windows means.
BL: What it is. What it represents.
FG: With Verendrye, I have the urge to go up and see what would happen if you opened the door. By keeping it way back here, Wayne leaves us with the urge alone, which you can follow only in your imagination and your feelings.
BL: He is an artist who is continuously seeking and often finding the place where observation and perception intersect without either one disturbing or belying the other one. You see a schoolhouse or a landscape from a distance, and it appears to be at the distance from which he saw it originally. Yet, as you look, you realize he could not have seen all its subtle details from that position. Nature doesn’t organize itself entirely like that. André Kertész8 said to me once, when we were talking about his pictures, “I don’t do anything, I do very little. Nature begins the thing. I complete it, that’s all.” I played dumb and said, “Begins what?” He looked at me as if he were talking to a child, and said, “The picture! What else?!” And that’s what is going on here with Gudmundson’s work; the world began that picture with the school wall. He had to complete it in a way that was true to the way nature began it and was also true to the nature of pictures. In some lucky cases, you see it right then, but sometimes you have to work like a dog, and forty-five minutes to an hour later you find that place where you can put the tripod down and it looks innocent. That is to say, as unintentional and unsullied by man’s perception as it did when you first saw it, but with all the strength and impact of the thing that made you say, “Oh, oh my, wow!”
FG: Sometimes you find the subject, but it’s not a picture.
BL: And there are so many places where it is a picture but not the subject. He’s out there in the cold, naked in the cold, with nothing around him but a road to tell him how to get back. If more people understood that this is the nature of this kind of art, and by and large of all kinds of art, pictures like these would have greater impact. As James Agee says in the introduction to Helen Levitt’s book A Way of Seeing: “It would help heal us.”9 In Wayne Gudmundson’s case, it’s really healing us of a lot of very toxic miscomprehensions about what we think the world has to be like in order to enable us to feel things.
FG: In order to nourish us.
BL: There are a lot of toxic miscomprehensions. Suzanne Langer calls it the “madhouse of too much art,”10 which we wouldn’t tolerate so easily if people understood what it took to make pictures like Gudmundson’s. I tell you, he’s doing a good job.
FG: Verendrye is indicative of what he is so wonderful at doing, which is to find exactly the distance from the things that move and draw him that allows us to feel the attraction, to recognize what we are looking at without fully satisfying our curiosity.
BL: How so?
FG: What he presents us with is a way in which the world can renew itself by not being too thoroughly consumed.
BL: Where there’s room for us to enter that world, there’s the possibility that it can enter our imaginations, and then our imaginations can dwell on it, and move through it in ways other than Gudmundson’s because he is not we, we are not he. You are absolutely right.
1 Édouard-Denis Baldus (1815–1882), French-German photographer who specialized in landscapes, architecture, and railroads.
2 Ole Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth, Eng. trans. (New York, 1927).
3 Willa Cather, My Antonia (New York, 1918).
4 Charles Olson (1910–1970), American poet and critic.
5 See Wayne Gudmundson and Robert Silberman, The Promise of Water: The Garrison Diversion Project (Fargo, 2002).
6 Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Below Zero, 1894, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery.
7 Diane Arbus, A House on a Hill, Hollywood, Cal., 1963, gelatin silver print.
8 André Kertész (1894–1985), Hungarian-American photographer.
9 Helen Levitt, A Way of Seeing (1946; New York, 1965). Levitt (b. 1918), American photographer acclaimed for her work photographing NewYork City in the 1930s and ’40s.
10 Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, 1953), 53–54.