Aftermath: The Wichita Falls Tornado, 1982
April 27 – May 23, 1984
On Tuesday, April 10, 1979, just after 6:00 p.m. a massive tornado struck the city of Wichita Falls. Leaving a mile-wide path of devastation through the city’s southwestern edge, the storm caused 46 deaths, injured approximately 3,200 people and destroyed over 20,000 homes. According to sources of the time, property damage was placed at $250 million dollars. Volunteers and public assistance poured in from across the nation. Within two years, 90 percent of damaged or lost homes were rebuilt. These are 40 before/after pairings, as he shot dramatically injured locations directly after the storm, and went back to those spots to rephotograph them a year later. In some cases, people had rebuilt was was lost—homes, business, roads and landscapes—with incredible fidelity, or they improved on whatever had been there, or conversely they simply washed their hands of it or razed the destruction and left a blank, or nature itself had taken over.
Born in 1942, in Texas, Frank Gohlke has helped to shape modern landscape photography and has influenced many contemporary landscape photographers. Gohlke originally studied English in college, but focused on photography and in 1966 met Walker Evans and studied privately with Paul Caponegro. He has traveled extensively for his landscape series. He’s documented the felling of thousands of trees due to the Mt. Saint Helens eruption in 1980, grain silos in the Midwest, and changing environments along various rivers in the Northeast. Part of the 1975 New Topographics, he has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally. He’s the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.
https://wfma.msutexas.edu/exhibitions/2022/resiliency-humility-fortitude-frank-gohlkes-aftermath