Grain elevator and lightning flash, Lamesa, Texas

When Frank Gohlke’s photographs of grain elevators were exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978, curator John Szarkowski described their allure in formal terms: “Grain elevators are a pleasure to photograph for the same reasons that gravestones are: both are simple, geometric, monochrome forms, rationally arranged in the landscape.” In this photograph, however, Gohlke pictured something far more dramatic—a bolt of lightning as it rips through the sky. The image gives equal weight to the massive industrial structures and the raw power of nature.