Remembering John Pfahl
by :
Gerald Mead
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
John Pfahl, Turbulent Water Near Whirlpool, 1985.
Soon after the news began to spread that Buffalo-based photographer John Pfahl had passed away, tributes and remembrances were posted on social media from across the country by friends, colleagues, former students, and admirers. They spoke fervently about his gracious nature and about their deep regard for his work, describing him as a, “gentle soul and inspiration,” “a wonderful mentor,” “an amazing photographer and person,” and “a master of his craft as well as a master of content.” Fellow Buffalo-native photographer Brendan Bannon wrote, “As a mentor, he showed me that photographers should be kind and generous in spirit as well as vision. His work illuminated the possibilities of seeing. One possibility was soul, other possibilities include humor, power, intelligence and most of all, an overwhelming need to see and know beauty.” Former Buffalonian Amy Caterina, a photography professor in California who was a good friend of John’s stated, “He encouraged me to make the best decisions of my life!”
Statements by scholars, curators, art critics and institutions soon followed that described him as, “world-renowned,” “an irreplaceable presence,” and, “a pioneer.” They also spoke about John’s well deserved place in the pantheon of contemporary photographers and the fact that his work “influenced generations who shot the land.”
His stature in the art world was confirmed by an extensive obituary in the New York Times with four of John’s photographs and a profile on CBS Sunday Morning. With each photographic tribute came a flood of memories of where I had first seen the images, what series they were part of and how they fit into the overall arc of his career. My thoughts and memories of John echo what many others have expressed and I consider myself fortunate to have connected with John on multiple levels–as a fellow artist, curator, and collector–over the 30 years I was privileged to know him (one significant highlight was when Nina Freudenheim exhibited our work together in the 2012 edition of ECHO Art Fair). In John’s obituary in the Buffalo News, I described him as, “undeniably Buffalo’s most revered and accomplished photographer.” My confidence in making that statement comes from the fact that John’s work is in the collections of the most prestigious museums in the world including MOMA, the Whitney, the Smithsonian and the Getty. Additionally, several monographs on his work have been published over the last 40 years and his work has been exhibited extensively across the US and in France, Italy, Japan, Germany, and Spain.
Nina Freudenheim Gallery booth at Echo Art Fair, 2012.
The art community of Western New York has been meaningfully diminished with John’s passing. The culture of a region is measured by its assets, and John Pfahl was one of those assets who lived modestly among us. Because of that proximity, and John’s longtime representation by the Nina Freudenheim Gallery in Buffalo, we were in the enviable position to see each new series of John’s work before it was shown in New York or elsewhere. Between the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Castellani Art Museum, and George Eastman House in Rochester, John’s prodigious legacy is well preserved regionally, represented by hundreds of images that exemplify John’s keen sense of place, and those institutions have each presented his work in major exhibitions at one time or another.
In 1985 the then named Buscaglia-Castellani Art Museum commissioned John to document the Niagara River from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. His Arcadia Revisited (1988) series that was exhibited at the museum and subsequently travelled was a response to vistas on that same route depicted in an 1886 portfolio by printmaker Amos Sangster.
The Albright-Knox organized the first ever comprehensive survey of John’s oeuvre in 1992 and it was the catalog for that exhibition that was my introduction to the brilliant scope of John’s work and his uncanny ability to create pictures that are infused with multiple layers of meaning. There is no denying the aesthetic appeal of John’s images, whether the subject is a billowing smokestack, a singular waterfall, a view through a picture window, a power plant nestled in a landscape, or ancient petroglyphs; they are visually stunning. Beyond their visual appeal and their celebration of the sublime beauty of nature, they subtly allude to man’s incursions into the natural world. Of his intent, John wrote, “I want to make pictures that work on a more mysterious level, that approach the truth by a more circuitous route.” Each of his series was as smart and conceptually fine tuned as the next. Another Buffalo photographer/colleague, Biff Henrich, noted that John believed that, “photography was a visual language as rich and robust as written language.”
I eventually got to know John and to visit his studio; in 1996 we exchanged artworks. As a young artist, the kindness and encouragement of that gesture meant the world to me. I selected a work from John’s iconic Altered Landscape (1974) series that depicted a sliver of landscape glimpsed between the columns of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and it became one of the first major pieces in my art collection. Years later I had the occasion to include his work in exhibitions I guest curated for CEPA Gallery and the Kenan Center. These included images from his little known 1981 Video Landscape series–platinum/palladium photographs of landscapes found in daily television programming on a black & white monitor–and artfully composed images he made from 1992-93 of his compost pile. John described the latter as, “[a] rich efflorescence of rotting vegetable matter that creates a daybook of both the memorable and mundane meals that grace my table.”
The most recent exhibition of John’s work in this region was presented at the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University last year. Drawn from the museum’s collection and titled Lake to Lake: John Pfahl and Amos W. Sangster, it reprised their 1986 exhibition and merged assiduous selections from these two important pictorial surveys of the Niagara River: Sangster’s 1886 prints and John’s commissioned photographs of related locations. Unfortunately, due to his health, he never saw that exhibition. I know he would have approved and I would have loved to hear his anecdotes of laboriously maneuvering the large view camera on a tripod he used in and around the Niagara gorge and other unique challenges that two years of research and exploration entailed. Knowing his exacting technical standards for his images, I am certain there were many tales to tell.
It’s hard to grasp that I will never again see John with his wife, artist Bonnie Gordon, by his side at the Nina Freudenheim Gallery, surrounded by his most recent photographs. I’ll miss the opportunity to chat with him about the subject, technique, and meaning of that new work. John was a kind hearted, gifted, and inspiring artist I held in very high regard. All grief is personal, and now that he is absent, my world has gotten smaller...and that makes me sad.
Gerald Mead is an independent curator, artist and educator who lives in Buffalo, NY. He has collected and exhibited John Pfahl’s work for 25 years.
