Emmet Gowin

(b Danville, WV, 22 Dec 1941). American photographer. He was a student of fine arts at Richmond Professional Institute, VA, from 1961 to 1965 and at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Harry Callahan from 1965 to 1967. From the late 1960s he was also influenced by Frederick Sommer. Gowin's deeply religious upbringing played an important role in his work. Most of his photographs from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s focus upon his wife and her family in Danville, VA, transforming them into universal symbols of ritual and family relationships. Many of these are deeply personal and almost religious in the powerful symbols they evoke; in Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1971 (see Gowin, 1976, p. 51) his wife is seen, as if clandestinely, in the privacy of a dark bedroom. His occasional use of a lens that vignettes the image into a circle also evoked ideas of a microcosm of the earth or of tourist photographs taken with an early Kodak camera.

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Gowin, Emmet (b. 1941), American photographer who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Reminiscent of his teacher Harry Callahan's classic images of his wife Eleanor, Gowin early on focused often on his own wife Edith, in tranquil rural settings. He sometimes used a snapshot technique, attaining a circular pinhole-like image by mounting a 10.2 × 12.7 cm (4 × 5 in) camera lens on a 20.3 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in) body. Later he created quietly evocative black-and-white aerial photographs of man-scarred landscapes, from the USA to Czechoslovakia.

— Tim Troy

Bibliography

• Gowin, E., and Reynolds, J., Changing the Earth (2002)

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Emmet Gowin (born 1941 in Danville, Virginia) is an American photographer.

After graduating from Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in 1965, Gowin attended the Rhode Island School of Design. While earning his MFA, Gowin studied under influential American photographers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.

Gowin teaches at Princeton University and lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Edith.

Career

Gowin first gained attention with his intimate portraits of his wife and family. His almost exclusive use of a large format camera led to both optical and darkroom experiments. Using a 4×5 lens with an 8×10 camera allowed Gowin to expose the full image circle, surrounded by a dramatic vignette, in his family portraits and rural landscapes.

Beginning with a trip to Washington state soon after Mt. Saint Helens erupted, Gowin began taking aerial photographs. For the next twenty years, Gowin captured strip mining sites, nuclear testing fields, large-scale agricultural fields and other scars in the natural landscape.

Gowin received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1979.

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