Late in high school, Gohlke's interest in photography waned; he sold his enlarger and, save for family snapshots, stopped taking pictures altogether.
[6] After graduating high school, Gohlke first attended Davidson College in North Carolina before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin, where he received a B.A.
[4][9] In 1971, Gohlke relocated to Minneapolis, and a year later, in 1972, he began his first major body of work, documenting the grain elevators of America's central plains.
From his early aesthetic interest in grain elevators, Gohlke became fascinated by their design, their connection to the surrounding landscape, and their function within the cities and towns they occupied.
[11] A selection of the photographs was eventually published as Measure of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Gohlke's first monograph.
[13] On April 10, 1979, an F4 tornado struck Gohlke's hometown of Wichita Falls, Texas, killing 42 people, injuring 1,700 more, and significantly damaging an 8 mile-square swath of the city.
[15] In 1981, several months after the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington, Gohlke made his first trip there to photograph the volcano and its environs.
In order to convey the enormity of the event, which devastated approximately 250 square miles, Gohlke employed a variety of approaches, including aerial and panoramic views and sequential photography (rephotography) over various periods of time.