Frank Gohlke was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1942.  He began taking photographs in dead earnest in 1967, when his plans for a career teaching English Literature foundered on the rocky shoals of a massive writer’s block.  He has been fortunate enough to be able to keep photography at the center of a life whose richness includes three daughters, two grandchildren, and many wonderful friends.  He has primarily been a photographer of landscapes, but that could always change.

42 30 North is a collaboration between a photographer, Frank Gohlke, and a poet and landscape historian, Herbert Gottfried.  It is a survey of the land within a single line of latitude, Forty two degrees Thirty minutes North, from the Atlantic Ocean at Marblehead, Massachusetts, to the Massachusetts-New York state boundary, a strip approximately one mile wide by 165 miles long.  The project makes no pretense of exhaustiveness, celebrating instead the arbitrariness of boundaries and the centrality of imagination in transforming terrain into place.  (frankgohlke.com)

David Maisel, a visual artist and photographer, chronicles the tensions between nature and culture in his large-scaled photographs of worlds that hover between the visible and the invisible, the natural and unnatural, the sacred and the profane. Maisel’s practice is concerned with mining the visual territory of what he terms the “apocalyptic sublime,” and with addressing themes of loss, elegy, and memorialization. He is perhaps best known for his large-scaled photographs in Black Maps, a multi-chaptered series of abstracted aerial images of environmentally impacted sites, such as open pit mines, clear cut forests, and cyanide leaching fields.

Maisel’s photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and many others. Maisel was a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Fall 2007, and an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Spring 2008. David Maisel’s work is represented by the Haines Gallery in San Francisco and the Von Lintel Gallery in New York. (davidmaisel.com)

Schiller’s satellite mashups confront many of the power dynamics inherent in maps and manifest in our impulse to claim, know and control space. In addition to his kaleidoscopic “quilts” for major American cities, Schiller has fractured and fused contested borders, sites of environmental tragedy and political conflict. In his series of Los Angeles freeway interchanges, the disorientation of automotive navigation is heightened in images that enfold our familiar corridors and boundaries.

Nikolas Schiller is a 28-year-old cartographer, consultant, digital artist, photographer, activist, and blogger living in America’s last continental colony, Washington, DC. (nikolasschiller.com)

Benton is a Professor of Architecture and former department chair at UC Berkeley. He harbors considerable passion for Kite Aerial Photography (KAP) and its associated historical, applied, and artistic dimensions. Benton takes his photographs using relatively simple handmade equipment. The camera is positioned by walking the kite around and aimed using a homebuilt, radio-controlled cradle. Composition is accomplished in absentia as he imagines what the camera above would see. “Kite aerial photography appeals to that part of me, perhaps of all of us, that would slip our earthly bonds and see the world from new heights. An aerial view offers a fresh perspective of familiar landscapes and in doing so challenges our spatial sensibilities, our grasp of relationships.”(hidden ecologies)

Angie Waller is a New York based artist who uses her online presence, couchprojects, to document a compelling set of cultural interventions in commercialism, shopping and social networking. Waller’s research-based art projects use the information collected from various online sources to form impressionistic, systematic visualizations (videos, photos, books, images, charts), which offer disarming perspectives on the everyday. (couchprojects.com)

“How much are terrains manipulated to become symbols of nostalgic elements of being and belonging. Amman has lived off the fantastical visual idioms that come with the sound of the words ‘Beirut’, ‘Damascus’, ‘Baghdad’, or ‘Haifa’. The names of these cities become a mise en abyme in that their is infinity in a word.” (oraibtoukan.com)

David Horvitz was born in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. His art practice uses an array of forms: photography, video, web-work, writing, and mail-art.  For photocartographies Horvitz is exhibiting a photograph shot in Iceland on one of the artist’s travels. Displayed with the photographs are documents of every means of transportation required to get from his home in New York to a small island in Reykjavik.(davidhorvitz.com)

g727 seeks to generate dialogues on artistic representations and interpretations of the urban landscape. The building blocks of a city comprise more than simply buildings, streets, and sidewalks. They equally encompass personal experience, collective memory and narratives. These are the less tangible, but no less integral elements that transform mere infrastructure into place. Through photography, painting, writing and video installations, artists open our eyes to these elements and heighten our awareness of what makes a place a place. g727 welcomes these artists to its space to help us all better understand the complex nature of cities and the urban condition. (recent g727 interview)

Much of Hernandez’s work confronts spaces of holy significance and geometric precision. This reveals a converging aesthetic that will be familiar to anyone who has visited a church or temple, a graveyard or a museum, a barren desert or a civic center. His images/objects feign a cartographic process, but one where the assumptions of authority are tested. Objective realities proposed by both maps and photographs are similarly confusing, although pulling in opposite directions. The traditional operation of a photograph presents the viewer with a singular subjectivity, that of the apparatus, the location of the camera. Conversely, a geographic map suggests that in the terrain represented, “you are here” or “here” or “here.” On one you cannot ever locate yourself in the projected image, and in the other you cannot help but “find yourself” in its representation. It is only human that we desire to have our “perspective” understood, respected and seen by others. To achieve this exchange with greater accuracy has long been the goal of man and machine. Hernandez approaches, with beautiful futility, a universe that has no math, no map, no image and no place from which one can really take it all in. (exilechild.com)

Adam Ryder is an MFA candidate in the Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York.  In his work, he utilizes the unique language of photographic and digital imaging technologies to explore the myriad ways in which architecture, infrastructure, and development shape our lives.  His piece in Photocartographies combines elements from one hundred and fifty publicly availably aerial photographs from around the country via the United States Geological Survey.  Ryder showcases how the imposition of formal-rational systems on the landscape have created interchangeable spaces, capable of being assembled like so many blocks into a new, simulacral form resembling the agrarian interior of the country. (adamryder.com)

Anthony Auerbach is an artist out of London, working in different places. He is also active as a theorist. His (photo)cartographic interests stem from a preoccupation with drawing, hence with surfaces: marks, traces, inscriptions, and erasure of the same.

The State of New York is an aerial survey of the whole state of New York from an altitude of seven feet. The survey records the surface of a giant copy of the Texaco road map which was inlaid in the terrazzo floor of the New York State Pavilion for the 1964–65 World’s Fair. The pavilion, designed by Philip Johnson and advertised as the ‘Tent of Tomorrow’, now stands derelict in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens. (aauerbach.info)

“At the far end of the Bonneville Speedway stands the mountain known as Floating Island–”floating” because it appears to arise from water, and “island” because it is separated from other elevated landscape features by accumulated silts — feet deep (the Bonneville Salt Flat). The idea of using Floating Island as a geographical referent in mental maps made by people visiting the area is somewhat ironic. Most of the mountain is underground, and what rises 1200 feet above the playa is often indistinguishable from the mountains behind it.”

Bash is founder and Principal Investigator at the Itinerant Laboratory for Perceptual Inquiry. Her ongoing project, A Field Guide to Observable Phenomena, manifests her engagement with imaging, imagining, language, and experience of place as both creative analysis and critical practice. (katherinebash.com & itinerantlaboratory.org)

The intense bombing of World War II left the streets of many European cities clogged with the remains of demolished masonry buildings. In Berlin alone, over 45 million cubic meters of debris was cleared during post-war rebuilding efforts. After intact bricks were recovered for reuse, with much of the manual labor performed by women, waste materials were transported to distributed collection locations and piled into hills known in German as Schuttberg or Trümmerberg. Today, these debris hills are difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring features as they have been landscaped into parks with manicured grass and densely vegetated sections.

Noah Beil is an Oakland, California based photographer who interprets history by examining the landscape.(www.noahbeil.com)

Brian Rosa is an urban researcher, photographer, and curator.  Originally from New Haven, CT, and most recently based in Mexico City, he is beginning a PhD in human geography at The University of Manchester (UK).  He is currently living in Manchester.  (brianrosa.net)