Emmet Gowin: Photographs

Emmet Gowin's first monograph. Photographs and afterword by Gowin. 101 pages; 68 full-page duo-toned b&w plates; 9 x 10.25 inches.

Photographs

Arts & Photography

Gowin, Emmet

Individual Artists

KNOPF

Photo essay by Emmet & Elijah Gowin with an introduction by Edith Gowin

Maggie

Gowin, Elijah

Tin Roof Press

A stunning portrait of the nocturnal moths of Central and South America by famed American photographer Emmet Gowin
American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) is best known for his portraits of his wife, Edith, and their family, as well as for his images documenting the impact of human activity upon landscapes around the world. For the past fifteen years, he has been engaged in an equally profound project on a different scale, capturing the exquisite beauty of more than one thousand species of nocturnal moths in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana, and Panama.
These stunning color portraits present the insects―many of which may never have been photographed as living specimens before, and some of which may not be seen again―arrayed in typologies of twenty-five per sheet. The moths are photographed alive, in natural positions and postures, and set against a variety of backgrounds taken from the natural world and images from art history.
Throughout Gowin’s distinguished career, his work has addressed urgent concerns. The arresting images of Mariposas Nocturnas extend this reach, as Gowin fosters awareness for a part of nature that is generally left unobserved and calls for a greater awareness of the biodiversity and value of the tropics as a universally shared natural treasure. An essay by Gowin provides a fascinating personal history of his work with biologists and introduces both the photographic and philosophical processes behind this extraordinary project.
Essential reading for audiences both in photography and natural history, this lavishly illustrated volume reminds readers that, as Terry Tempest Williams writes in her foreword, “The world is saturated with loveliness, inhabited by others far more adept at living with uncertainty than we are.”

Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

A photographic study of the land that served as the main testing site for American nuclear devices for four decades
More nuclear bombs have been detonated in America than in any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National Security Test Site was the primary location for these activities, withstanding more than a thousand nuclear tests that left swaths of the American Southwest resembling the moon. In The Nevada Test Site, renowned American photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents staggering aerial photographs of this powerfully evocative place.
Gowin remains the only photographer granted official and sustained access to the Nevada Test Site. For this book, he has revisited his original negatives, made in 1996 and 1997, and fully three-quarters of the images featured here have never been published before. These images show blast areas where sand has been transformed to glass, valleys pockmarked with hundreds of craters, trenches that protected soldiers from blasts, areas used to bury radioactive waste, and debris left behind following tests conducted as deep as five thousand feet below the Earth’s surface. Together, these stunning, unsettling views unveil environmental travesties on a grand scale. An essay by Gowin delves into the history of his work at the site, including his decade-long efforts to secure entry, the photographic equipment and techniques employed, and what the images mean to him today.
With a foreword by photographer and writer Robert Adams, The Nevada Test Site stands as a testament to the harms we inflict on our surroundings, the importance of bearing witness, and the possibilities for aesthetic redemption and a more hopeful future.

The Nevada Test Site

A powerful photographic survey of the impact of irrigation systems on the landscape of the United States In The One Hundred Circle Farm, renowned photographer Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) presents stunning aerial images of center-pivot irrigation systems in the western and midwestern United States. This type of farming involves a method of watering crops in which equipment rotates around a centrally drilled well, creating enormous, distinct circles of irrigated land, often in the midst of dry terrain. Anyone who has taken a cross-country flight has likely seen countless acres of these iconic symbols of industrial agriculture. Through a faithful yet personal photographic survey, Gowin's powerful images not only bear witness to the ambitions humans wield in shaping the landscape, but also attest to how such primal elements--circles, pivots, and lines--symbolize water depletion and the fragile environment. The stark photographic compositions, more than one hundred in all, were created over eight years. Fields resemble lost civilizations; crops gape like strange new suns. Hauntingly beautiful, the images highlight Earth's nourishing geology, visual evidence of our labors. Inscribed onto the earth, these lines are reminders of the technology extracting unimaginable amounts of water that cannot be replaced, and raise questions about what large-scale irrigation must answer for when the water runs out. With an afterword by anthropologist Lucas Bessire discussing the history and impact of pivot irrigation on American farming, The One Hundred Circle Farm stands as a poetic visual record, evidence of the tenuous connections between human enterprise and our planet's most precious resource.

The One Hundred Circle Farm

Painting

Emmet Gowin Photographs

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Philadelphia Museum of Art and Bulfinch Press

Hidden Likeness

The Morgan Library & Museum

Throughout his prolific career as a photographer, Emmet Gowin has threaded together seemingly disparate subjects: his wife, Edith, and their extended family; American and European landscapes; aerial views of environmental devastation, brought together by his ongoing interest in issues of scale, the impact of the individual, and notions of belonging. This long-awaited survey pays tribute to Gowin’s remarkable career and his impact on the medium. Following his marriage to Edith Morris in 1964, Gowin began work on a series of images of his extended family that is now recognized as a touchstone of twentieth-century American photography. He photographed the children and the aging parents, and made intimate portraits of his wife, continuing a photographic tradition inherited from his mentor, Harry Callahan, with whom he studied in the 1960s. His focus broadened in the 1980s, when he began an exploration of landscape and aerial photography, most specifically in his documentation of Mount St. Helens and the American West. He has photographed in the Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, Japan and the United States, with a continued interest in irrigation, mining and natural resources, and the effects of military testing on the environment. As a photography professor at Princeton University from 1973 to 2009, Gowin has exerted a powerful influence on several generations of photographers.

Emmet Gowin

Photography & Video

Aperture

XAVIER BARRAL

Following his marriage to Edith Morris in 1964, Virginia photographer Emmet Gowin began to make portraits of his wife and extended family in and around his rural hometown of Danville. In this collection of 68 black-and-white images, first published in 1976 by Alfred A. Knopf, and now lovingly brought back into print by Steidl Photography International, Gowin writes, "in 1964, I entered into a family freshly different from my own. I admired their simplicity and generosity, and thought of the pictures I made as agreements. I wanted to pay attention to the body and personality that had agreed out of love to reveal itself." Inspired by the work of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Frederick Sommer and his mentor, Harry Callahan, Gowin approaches his subjects with a reverence for the relationship between photographer and subject. Although his images often resemble snapshots, he makes pictures that succeed as more than just family records--one technique is to employ a circular vignette around the image. The pictures collected in this new edition of Emmet Gowin: Photographs are from new scans of the vintage prints, impeccably reproduced.

Steidl Photography International

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Books by Gowin, Emmet

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gowin, Emmet. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Photographs

Maggie

Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity

The Nevada Test Site

The One Hundred Circle Farm

Emmet Gowin Photographs

Hidden Likeness

Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin: Photographs