Gerry Johansson's sensitive and subtle photographs hint at human life through the occasional car or lone figure but for the most part they draw the reader's eye to the simplistic architecture of a small American town. In singling out Pontiac, Johansson offers comment on more than the landscape, photographing a microcosm of the effects of the decline in the auto industry in Michigan. His images survey the landscape with a characteristic Swedish melancholy, echoing the new topographic photographers of the 1970s.

Pontiac

Gerry Johansson

Mack

Since the early eighties, Gerry Johansson has made quiet pictures of quiet places, often lying in the shadows of industrial decline. For American Winter, Johansson travelled through semi-deserted towns in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, finding as much beauty as there was misery in landscapes cloaked in snow: an isolated church floating in a mottled sea of white; leafless trees lining endless highways leading to nothing; long shadows cast on vernacular architecture in the season's merciless sun. In his photographs time appears to stand still: neighbourhoods that once possessed the allure of Art Deco architecture, or the glory of bustling Main Streets, are now home to abandoned school buildings and cars parked decades ago. Johansson's ascetic framing and sensitivity to light lends itself to the scenery and the sense of hopelessness evoked by these neglected places. Publisher: Mack

American Winter

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Over more than three decades, Gerry Johansson has brought his shrewd and sensitive eye to bear on peripheral landscapes the world over, from Ulan Bator to Antarctica. Spanish Summer sees him return to one of the first places that captured his imagination: the plains of central Spain. The chapel remained etched into Johansson’s memory and, decades later, led him to return and rediscover the country’s architectural heritage, religious significance, and beauty. With these images, a survey is conducted of a landscape into which thousands of years of cultural traces have bedded down. Johansson’s exacting composition and delicate black-and-white tonalities reveal a transient territory in which telephone wires transcend hoary crucifixes, modern plaster meets timeworn stone, and the shadows of industrial megaliths reach blindly across the dust.

Spanish Summer

MACK BOOKS

America Revised

Only Photography

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Books by Gerry Johansson