Gohlke's subject is the landscape and how it both records and reveals the push and pull of human and nature. His images of Wichita Falls, Texas, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, show us the edges of cities and how they break onto the prairie or spill into a river. More recently and in large-scale color prints, he has documented the Sudbury River, a tributary of the Concord River that meanders through the rapidly changing landscape of the outer rings of Boston's suburban sprawl. Gohlke's work often begs the question of how much "nature" there actually is in our present environment. In his work on Mount St. Helen's following the 1981 eruption, one sees richly textured and other-worldly images of wrecked trees and eroded hillsides. At the same time, contemporary images of timber harvesting methods and eruption reclamation ask the viewer to consider, among other things, what might the differences be between the changes wrought by the eruption and the practices of clear-cutting as undertaken by modern lumber companies.

To this potentially controversial material, Gohlke brings a serene eye. He does not pretend to have answers, but presents evidence, which then suggests the questions the viewer might ask. He frames his subjects with extreme care, often printing an entire negative with a virtuoso technique that is rich in tonal range and color effects.

Gohlke received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in English Literature and his M.A. from Yale in the same subject. Following a year of study with the photographer Paul Caponigro, he began his career in photography. In addition to publishing and exhibiting his work, he has taught photography at many different schools, most recently at Harvard University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Gohlke has been exhibiting his work nationally since the early 1970's. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Milwaukee Art Museum, to name a few. He is represented in many private and public collections, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

He has received commissions for public projects for the Tulsa International Airport, for an office complex in Basel, Switzerland, for the City of Venice, and for the Mission Photographique de la DATAR, a French government-sponsored agency documenting the French landscape. Commissioned publications include work for Seagram's, the Bell System, and the George Gund Foundation.

His more recent publications include Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape (1992), The Sudbury River: A Celebration (1993), Parco del Gigante (for the city of Rubiera and province of Reggio Emilia, Italy) (1995), and 26 black and white photographs of Lake Erie for the Annual Report of the George Gund Foundation (1998).