with John Paul Caponigro,Camera Arts,Dec./Jan.
1998–1999).
Born in Danville, Virginia, in 1941, Emmit
Gowin was raised by devout parents, his father a
Methodist minister, his mother a Quaker. During
his high school years, he was inspired by Ansel
Adams’s pictures and began to take photographs.
In 1960, he attended the Danville Technical Ins-
titute as a business major. In 1961, he enrolled at
the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia
Commonwealth University) to study painting and
photography, earning a B.A. in 1965. During these
college years, in 1964, he married Edith Morris
and formed a close tie with her family in Danville.
Edith, along with their sons, Elijah and Isaac, and
her extended family became a subject of his pho-
tographs in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Gowin attended the Rhode Island School of
Design, receiving his M.F.A. in 1967, and these
years, 1965–1967, proved crucial to his artistic
development. While he experimented with 35-mm
photography, influenced by the work of Henri Car-
tier-Bresson and Robert Frank, he also studied
with Harry Callahan, who encouraged his use of
larger picture formats, seen in images such as
Nancy, Danville, Virginia, 1965. And, much as Call-
ahan had, Gowin focused on his wife as a subject;
his early portraits of her clearly demonstrate their
intimate and deep bond, although some, such as
Edith, Danville, Virginia, 1971, capturing Edith uri-
nating while standing, were shocking to many when
first exhibited. Much like Sally Mann’s work of
about a decade later, Gowin’s depictions of child-
hood and intimate family life often reveal more
about the viewers who find them disturbing than
about the photographer or the subjects of the pho-
tos. During this period, in 1966, he visited Walker
Evans in New York, and, with Callahan’s assist-
ance, he met, and later developed a friendship with
Frederick Sommer, who influenced his technique
and thinking.
From 1967–1971, Gowin taught photography at
the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio, and in 1971 his
photographs were reproduced inAlbumandAper-
ture. He became widely known for pictures of his
rural domestic life, which combine unflinching
innocence and snapshot spontaneity with inspired
composition and technical experiment. Gowin
reflects on images such asNancy and Twine Con-
struction, Danville, Virginia, 1971: ‘‘through the
lives of new relatives, my more whole family, I
returned to the mood that finds solemnity in daily
life. As a child, one has the time for such pastimes as
sunlight on water or the weave of the porch screen
and the openings and closings of those doors. I wish
never to outgrow that leisure’’ (Emmet Gowin:
Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990).
Gowin augmented the mood of pictures of Edith
and his family in Danville through experiments with
circular lenses:
About the circular pictures: I had quite forgotten that it
was the nature of the lens to form a circle and in 1967 my
only lens was a short Angulon intended for a small cam-
era. I’d been given an old Eastman View 810 and
brought the two together out of impatience and curiosity.
After a while, I recognized the wonderful exaggeration
near the edge. I began to use the camera with this lens,
but for several years I would trim these prints so that the
circle was disguised. Eventually I realized that such a lens
contributed to a particular description of space and that
the circle itself was already a powerful form.
(Emmet Gowin: Photographs, Knopf, 1976, p. 101)During the 1970s, Gowin began to travel exten-
sively, particularly in Great Britain, Italy, and
Jordan, and to photograph both cultivated and
uncultivated landscapes. He became established in
the academic and arts worlds, and in 1973, he
accepted a teaching position at Princeton Univer-
sity. While residing with his wife and children in
Newtown, Pennsylvania, he gave lectures and
workshops at the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, and Yale University, and over time, through-
out the United States, Europe, and Japan. His
workshops and writing often focused on the dark-
room techniques, such as selective and over-all
bleaching, combination developing, toning, and
contour mapping that distinguish his images. He
received prestigious honors, such as the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. As
his renown as a teacher and mentor grew, he
brought Frederick Sommer to be a visiting Senior
Fellow at Princeton.
In the 1980s, Gowin began to take aerial land-
scape photographs, both of natural geologic
features and of altered landscapes. In 1980, a
fellowship from the Seattle Arts Commission
brought him to Washington, where he photo-
graphed the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens
eruption, creating images such as Spirit Lake,
Mount St. Helens, Washington, 1980. Over many
years, he returned to Washington to photograph
Mount St. Helens and, also in Washington, the
Hanford Nuclear Reservation. He photographed
from an airplane using a gyroscopically stabilized
Hasselblad camera, originally developed by
NASA to record space flights. In 1982, at the
invitation of his former Princeton student, Queen
Noor al Hussein, he visited Jordan and pho-GOWIN, EMMET