Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Emmit Gowin
Well, I slammed my camera pretty hard into a hard-wood floor, so I can't put any photos up. It was an accident. So I decided that I would just talk about a lecture that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, sponsored about a week ago. The Photo Forum group had Emmit Gowin come into town and talk about his work. I wasn't really familiar with it, though I had heard his name for years. Turns out he's a very engaging guy. I don't know when this photo was taken, but he still looks pretty much like this.
Here's a brief bio:
Emmit Gowin, who was born in Danville, Virginia, received his M.F.A. in 1967 from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Harry Callahan. Gowin's photographs feature his wife, Edith, and record her changing features and their life together. Also a landscape photographer, he has made aerial photographs in Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and Japan since the 1980s, documenting the scarring of the land by military test sites, pivot irrigation, gold courses, and fresh battlefields. Gowin has received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977 and an NEA fellowship in 1979, and teaches photography at Princeton University.
Ann Strader, Museum of New Mexico, Museum of Fine Arts.
I've always been a fan of Harry Callahan's photographs of his wife, so I'm not surprised that Gowin, as his student, took up the same subject (though he used a different wife, obviously). His early work was about his family and he made very good use of familiar tropes.
He said some pretty interesting things, including something to the effect that the purpose of photography is to reveal secrets, and if you haven't given much of yourself to the work, haven't revealed much about yourself, you haven't done so much.
He's also quoted elsewhere as saying "Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to." That certainly comes out in his environmental images. He has been photographing nuclear test sites and there is an uncanny feeling that he's actually photographing another planet. He makes beautiful images of the most horrific subjects.
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