John Gossage (b. 1946) is an American artist from Staten Island, New York, known for his conceptually rich, subversive, and meticulously crafted artist books and photographic publications. His work often centers on overlooked aspects of the urban landscape—abandoned lots, refuse, graffiti, barbed wire, and other fragments of the built environment—through which he explores themes such as surveillance, memory, and the intersection of architecture and power.
Gossage’s photographs are rooted in the idea of noticing what typically goes unnoticed. As writer Gus Blaisdell observed in The Romance Industry (Nazraeli Press, 2001), “Gossage is always about the luxuriance of what goes unnoticed, what goes unseen until his pictures call your attention to it.” He captures the residue of human activity—markings on a wall, a table after a meal—as a way of confronting the viewer with the fleeting nature of experience and the way the present quickly recedes into memory.
During the 1980s, Berlin became a central focus of his work. The city, marked by the Wall and layered with histories both forgotten and remembered, provided the ideal setting for Gossage to refine his distinct approach to photographic storytelling. These explorations culminated in Berlin in the Time of the Wall, published by Loosestrife Editions in 2004.
In 2010, Aperture reissued and updated The Pond, Gossage’s groundbreaking visual meditation inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond, further cementing his reputation as a major voice in contemporary photography.
Other works available upon request.
