For all their range and diversity, Emmet Gowin’s photographs remind us of something very simple: the wonder of seeing. Over his fifty-year career, Gowin (U.S., b. 1941) has looked at the world in a fresh, personal, and revelatory manner.
Gowin achieved renown by focusing on what is often “invisible” as an artistic subject: the intimacy of the domestic realm. He has investigated the technical means of seeing—for example, by putting a lens intended for a smaller format on his large 8×10-inch camera, creating mysteriously vignetted circular images. And he has explored new vantage points on the world by making landscape photographs from helicopters and small airplanes. In embracing these fresh modes of perception, Gowin has provided a powerful example for other photographers: he demonstrates the power of seeing familiar things as if for the first time.
Gowin’s pictures honor the medium’s past—he happily acknowledges the influence of figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer and Harry Callahan—while exploring classic themes in a new way. His intellectual resources are unusually varied. As a youth, he was strongly influenced by his study of the Bible (his father was a Methodist minister). In the early 1960s, he was struck powerfully by two television presentations—the film “The Night of the Hunter,” an expressionist parable about innocence and evil, and Samuel Beckett’s existentialist play “Waiting for Godot.” Gowin studied painting and drawing as a college undergraduate and he has long been devoted to the art and writings of the early nineteenth-century mystic William Blake.
While diverse, these influences share a quality of expression—all involve the suggestion of larger truths in the evidence of the commonplace. Throughout his career, Gowin has shown a great reverence for the real, while inclining toward larger spiritual or metaphoric truths.
A master of classic “analogue” photography, Gowin crafts black-and-white prints as precise and evocative artistic statements. He has favored cameras ranging in size from the 2-1/4-inch square format to a tripod-mounted 8×10-inch view camera. These large formats ensure images with fine detail and a subtle range of tones. Since about 1980 he has often used toners in the darkroom to add warmth or a subtle color to his black-and-white prints. These procedures underscore the poetic, rather than strictly factual, intention of his work.
Gowin first achieved art-world renown in the early 1970s for his photographs of his wife Edith and her extended family, in Danville, Virginia. Inspired by the simplicity of the amateur snapshot, these graceful and mysterious images elevate the details of everyday life to the level of dream and myth.
While Edith has remained an important subject over the years, Gowin’s interests grew to include the landscape, deep cultural time, and the traces of human activity on the face of the earth. Beginning in the early 1970s, he traveled to Ireland, England, and Italy, and through the American West. In the early 1980s, he explored two noted archaeological sites: the Italian village of Matera, with dwellings carved out of solid rock, and the ancient temples of Petra, in Jordan.
He began working from the air in 1980, seeking to capture the magnitude of the Mount St. Helens explosion. In the later 1980s and 1990s, Gowin recorded the traces of the nuclear age—the surface evidence of underground bomb-test sites in Nevada, and the toxic landscape of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation site, Washington—as well as the patterns of center-pivot agriculture across the American West. More recently, he has been fascinated by the profusion of life in the tropics—specifically, the wondrous variety of moths in Central America. Throughout these years, Edith, his original inspiration and muse, has remained a vital subject.
There may be a tendency to think of photography as an art of the mundane and the immediate—of images made with a casual “snap.” Gowin’s career is the result of a much slower, more deliberate, and more thoughtful approach. While he loves the fact that an image can be captured in 1/125th of a second, Emmet Gowin’s goal has always been to fill each of those fractions of a second with the wisdom of a lifetime.
–Keith F. Davis, Senior Curator of Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
