JOHN GOSSAGE

An Exhibition about a Book:
Berlin in the Time of the Wall

November 15 – December 31, 2004
Contact Sheet 129


By any measure John Gossage is a non-conformist. He was thrown out of high school at sixteen, yet taught college at the graduate school level for close to fifteen years. He was never formally trained as a graphic designer, yet has designed twelve of his own photography books, as well as numerous books for other artists. He grew up in a household where there was no art, no music and no books, yet has amassed a personal library of thousands of photography books, curated dozens of photography exhibitions, and served as a consultant to art collectors and foundations around the world.

The photographic series, Berlin in the Time of the Wall, exists in multiple presentations. A hard bound, four hundred page book was just published. Contact Sheet 129, the exhibition catalogue, highlights a selection of photographs from the book. And the exhibition at Light Work includes yet another selection and sequencing of the project. To create so many different presentations of one body of work would be a challenge to most artists. However, at the core of what Gossage has produced over the past twenty years is the desire to order and reorder what on the surface appears to be images of ordinary places where something is, or has been, profoundly wrong, dangerous or deadly. By allowing himself the freedom to fashion the images that compose Berlin in the Time of the Wall into so many different but related forms, Gossage pushes aside convention in order to reinvent how to look at the remains of history as if it were a living thing instead of a finite story.