John Gossage

John Gossage’s conspicuous intellectual sentience is extremely uncommon in an artist of his visual sensitivity. He is an ardent student of photography. He is as irrepressibly curious and competitive as any artist I have encountered. Far from living in an isolated visual world, single-mindedly obsessed with his own photographs, Gossage not only has an extensive and much used library of publications on photography but engages in continual dialogue with his peers, particularly with William Eggleston, Lewis Baltz, Lee Friedlander, and the sculptor Anne Truitt, and more recently with Jan Groover, Alex Castro (a non-photographer), and Robert Cummings.

Among photographers, Gossage admires, above all, Eugene Atget; and second to Atget, Walker Evans. He says of Atget that his lesson is simple: ‘For him, syle is dictated by subject matter.’ It is this to which Gossage professedly aspires in his own work. Gossage is ultra-conscious of his milieu in both the cultural and physical senses. Gossage may have educated himself in the history of his medium to the point at which his bibliographic and sensuous command of the subject are truly formidable; nevertheless he insists that ‘I believe what I see, not what I read.’ Certainly the attention to what is seen in his photographs bears this out. He is an artist and not, first, a self-conscious stylist or historian.

- Jane Livingston, Camera, March, 1977

John Gossage studied with Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovitch, and Bruce Davidson. Internationally published and exhibited, John Gossage’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Bibliotheque National, Paris, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, and the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Gossage’s publications include The Pond, There and Gone, The Things That Animals Care About, and Empire, A History Book.