“Hey Fuckface” (HF)
Photography by John Gossage
Essay by Gus Blaisdell

Published by Nazraeli Press, Tucson, AZ, 2000

First Edition, First (and only) Printing

18 Original Prints

“Gossage photographs that which has just occurred to remind us that we may have

already forgotten it happened or that we were there. By asking us look at what we have misplaced or abandoned he brings us face to face with the present as it becomes history.”
– (Stephen Daiter Gallery)    

INTRODUCTION

This highly unusual, over-the-top collection of photographs presents prints with curses and obscenities scrawled on them. In an excerpt from the interview with the artist by Peter Lloyd, we can find the premise behind this disconcerting work. According to Lloyd, around 1999, John Gossage started to talk with him about the making of this project, which he had entitled “The Plains of Hell”, referring to photos, taken in New York State of Staten Island and the area around Syracuse; chosen by consulting the 103c list of hazardous waste sites. The EPA detailed these specific locations of massive pollution that have not yet made it to the more public Superfund list. As he was first shooting these pictures, Gossage said that he would use a map and drive to the precise locations detailed on the list, but as the work continues, he found he could find the sites by “'visual smell”. Perhaps this project was more like the “Pains of Hell” to this artist.

John Gossage, born in 1946 in Staten Island, New York City, is an American photographer, noted for exploring under-recognized elements of the urban environment such as abandoned tracts of land, debris and graffiti, and themes of surveillance, memory and the relationship between architecture and power. Interested in photography at an early age, he left school at 16 and took private instruction from Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovich, and Bruce Davidson. He later moved to Washington, D.C. to study, and received a grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, allowing him to stay and refine his technique. Since 1963, he has shown his photographs in solo and group exhibitions and his work is held in numerous private and public collections. Among his publications are Berlin in the Time of the Wall (2004), The Romance Industry (2002), The Things That Animals Care About (1988), Stadt des Schwarz, LAMF: Three Days in Berlin 1987 (1987), and Hey Fuckface (1984), a visual study of some Environmental Protection Agency-listed hazardous waste sites in New York state. Many of these books are published in unusual formats, such as a wooden box with sliding Plexiglas panel, or with a newspaper clipping dust cover. Gossage collaborated with then-wife Terri Weifenbach on the Snake Eyes (2002). After a number of years with Nazraeli Press, his usual publisher is now Loosestrife Editions. He has taught at the University of Maryland, College Park and now lives and works in Washington, D.C.