Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin (born 1941) is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photographs of places that had been changed by humans or nature, including the Hanford Site, Mount St. Helens, and the Nevada Test Site. Gowin taught at Princeton University for more than 35 years.

Life and career

Gowin was born in Danville, Virginia. His father, Emmet Sr., was a Methodist minister and his Quaker mother played the organ in church. When he was two his family moved to Chincoteague Island, where he spent much of his free time in the marshes around their home drawing animals and plant life. At about age 12 his family moved back to Danville, where Gowin. When he was 16 he saw an Ansel Adams photograph of a burnt tree with a young bud growing from the stump. This inspired him to go into the woods near his home and draw from nature. They married in 1964, and she quickly became both his muse and his model. Later they had two sons, Elijah Gowin (also a photographer in his own right) and Isaac.

Some of his earliest photographic vision was inspired by Edith's large and engaging family, who allowed him to record what he called "a family freshly different from my own." and lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Edith.

Style and aesthetics

Gowin has acknowledged that the photographs of Eugene Atget, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Alfred Stieglitz, and especially Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer have influenced him. These photos feel both posed and highly intimate at the same time, often capturing seemingly long and direct stares from his wife or her family members or appearing to intrude on a personal family moment. Gowin once said that "the coincidence of the many things that fit together to make a picture is singular. They occur only once. They never occur for you in quite the same way that they occur for someone else, so that in the tiny differences between them you can reemploy a model or strategy that someone else has used and still reproduce an original picture. Those things that do have a distinct life of their own strike me as being things coming to you out of life itself."

In an essay for the catalog for an exhibition of his work at Yale University, writer Terry Tempest Williams said "Emmet Gowin has captured on film the state of our creation and, conversely, the beauty of our losses. And it is full of revelations."

Publications Emmet Gowin: Photographs. Emmet Gowin. New York: Knopf, 1976. . (Reprint. Göttingen: Steidl, 2009 .) emmet gowin. Photographs: 1966-1983. Peter Bunnell and Emmet Gowin. Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1983 . Exhibition also at Princeton University Art Museum Spring 1984. Petra. In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Emmet Gowin. Essay by Phillip C. Hammond. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 1986 . Exhibition. Emmet Gowin: Photographs. Emmet Gowin. Introduction by Martha Chahroudi. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990. . Exhibition. Aerial Photographs. Emmet Gowin. Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 1998 . Exhibition. Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth: aerial photographs. Emmet Gowin and Jock Reynolds. Essay and interview by Terry Tempest Williams and Philip Brookman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. . Exhibition. Emmet Gowin, Photographs: 1967-2000. Tokyo: Nihon University, 2004. Exhibition. Mariposas Nocturna ‒ Edith in Panama. Emmet Gowin. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 2006. . Pace/MacGill Gallery exhibition. Maggie. Coauthored with Elijah Gowin. Introduction by Edith Gowin. Kansas City: Tin Roof Press, 2008. . Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait. Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2009. . Exhibition. Emmet Gowin. Carlos Gollonet, Keith F. Davis, Emmet Gowin, and Carlos Martin Garcia, authors. Madrid: Fundación Mapfre / New York: Aperture, 2013. . (Emmet Gowin's World by Carlos Gollonet; Where Pictures Come From: Sources of Emmet Gowin's Vision by Keith F. Davis; Things Only You Will See by Emmet Gowin; Chronology by Carlos Martin Garcia; as well as uncredited, List of Works.) Exhibition. Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan. Emmet Gowin and Joel Smith. New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 2015. Publication includes plates, interview, and Exhibition Checklist. Exhibition May 22 through September 20, 2015. A Shared Elegy. Elijah Gowin - Emmet Gowin/ Osamu James Nakagawa - Takayuki Ogawa. Nanette Esseck Brewer, Joel Smith, and Yoshiko Suzuki. Bloomington : Grunwald Gallery of Art, Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, 2017. Exhibition Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University Bloomington October 13- November 16, 2017. Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity. Emmet Gowin and Terry Tempest Williams. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. . (Foreward/ Winged Resistance by Terry Tempest Williams; Mariposas Nocturnas/ Index Plates (fifty-one, each with twenty-five "moth portraits," identifications on facing page) by Emmet Gowin; An Afterword/ Notes from the Field -- Here on Earth Now by Emmet Gowin; Acknowledgements by Emmet Gowin; and An Alphabetical List of Species Names.) Here on Earth Now: Notes from the Field. Emmet Gowin. Afterword by Peter MacGill. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 2017. . Exhibition at Pace/MacGill Gallery. The Nevada Test Site. Emmet Gowin. Foreword by Robert Adams. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019. .

Exhibitions Fundación Mapfre, PhotoEspaña festival, Madrid, 2013