Emmet Gowin

Danville and Edith: How Family Became the Subject

Emmet Gowin was born in Danville, Virginia, in 1941. As a teenager he encountered Ansel Adams’s photographs and began to understand that photography could become a spiritual experience as well as a record of fact. ^*1 After marrying Edith Morris in 1964, her family and children, along with gardens and interiors close to home, became the center of his work. ^*3 Precisely because the subjects were familiar, age, light, gesture, and distance could reveal aspects of them he did not already know. For Gowin, family photography became a way to look repeatedly at the people closest to him; commemoration was secondary. Across their marriage, Edith participated in shaping the work through choices of gesture, clothing, and setting, taking a role that exceeded that of a model. ^*29 What the couple called an “agreement” meant more than permission to photograph. It was a shared decision to turn a particular moment into a picture. Within the family culture and religious environment of southern Virginia, Gowin began with the people closest to him rather than distant public events. ^{*7 *10 *20}

Two important figures in shaping those private subjects into art photography were Harry Callahan, with whom Gowin studied at RISD, and Frederick Sommer, whom he came to know personally. ^*17 Callahan’s long photographs of his wife Eleanor and family provided a precedent for repeatedly returning to everyday subjects while changing technique. From Sommer, Gowin learned to trust unexpected correspondences within an image and leave the subject partly unexplained. ^*18 Gowin applied that rigor to Edith and her family, adjusting viewpoint, light, circular framing, and print quality to transform forms of intimacy associated with the family album into art photographs made for others to see. His teaching at Princeton University, beginning in 1973, also became a place to discuss with younger photographers how private subjects could become public works. ^*25 Gowin’s photography and teaching coincided with the period in which family photography became a major field within American art photography from the 1970s onward. ^*14

The social conditions of the 1960s and 1970s also entered the intimacy of home. Gowin later recalled receiving a draft notice in 1965, the year he entered graduate school, and described the entire period of his family photographs as taking place against the Vietnam War. He even referred to the early family pictures, in one sense, as “war pictures,” because domestic life unfolded within a time marked by state violence.^*29 Images of Edith and the children hold domestic routine together with the draft and war continuing outside the home. War and conscription persist beyond the household while everyday life, nudity, jokes, and growth continue within it. Gowin’s attention to one-time gestures among people close to him also carries a period sense of how fragile the continuity of ordinary life could be.

“Agreement” and the Large-Format Camera

Gowin used a large-format camera and often left the lens’s image circle visible, producing circular photographs.^*25 A large-format camera requires setting up a tripod and focusing deliberately, so photographer and subject must share the duration of the exposure process.^*22 In the family photographs, the slowness of the large-format camera shaped the relationship of being photographed. Because subjects knew the picture was being made and shared the waiting time, the resulting intimacy differed from candid observation. The large-format camera also recorded detail at very high resolution: skin, fabric, garden, and wall surfaces appear with comparable density, allowing people and their surroundings to carry meaning together.^*23 Although these are family portraits, the full domestic environment remains in the frame, establishing a visual continuity with the later photographs of land. Slow working methods and high resolution turn the portrait into a joint record of person and lived space, allowing houses, gardens, fabrics, and walls to register as part of a history of relationships alongside the face.

Photographing someone close always carries the assumption that the photographer already “knows” the person. In Edith’s nudes and the family’s unusual poses, Gowin withholds explanation and leaves room beyond biography.^*8 That openness unsettles readings that would represent the family only through happiness or consume private life as spectacle. Intimacy appears instead as the experience of discovering that someone remains partly unknown even after decades of looking. The circular image also preserves the lens’s image circle, making the camera’s mechanical cropping of the world visible inside the photograph.^*25 The edge of the image never disappears into a natural “window”; the limits of seeing remain inscribed in the frame.

From Ground to Air: Looking at Bodies and Land with the Same Attention

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens led Gowin toward photographing the earth from the air. He eventually photographed forms inscribed on the land by human activity at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the Nevada Test Site, open-pit mines, irrigated farmland, and elsewhere.^*12 The shift from family photography to environmental subjects can appear abrupt if judged only by subject matter. Princeton University’s archive interprets the “love and wonder” directed toward Edith as continuing in Gowin’s attention to the surface of the earth.^*25 He changed scale, carrying the attentiveness developed through familiar bodies toward a changing landscape. In the aerial photographs, seconds-long gestures and decades of family growth give way to the longer durations left on the land by volcanic activity, nuclear testing, mining, and agriculture.^*13 By reading aging bodies and altered terrain as comparable “traces of time,” Gowin avoided treating portrait and landscape as separate genres. Landscape could itself become a long-duration portrait in which institutions and time leave visible changes on the land.

The aerial photographs register traces left by military systems, agriculture, and resource extraction. The U.S. Army selected Hanford as a site in 1942, and construction of plutonium-production facilities began in 1943. The site supported the nuclear weapons program for more than forty years and, since 1989, has been the focus of massive environmental cleanup.^*39 The geometries of Nevada Test Site craters and circular agricultural fields are traces of how military systems, resource development, and agricultural technologies have organized land.^*27 From the air, human bodies recede while their actions remain as roads, pits, borders, and geometries. Military and agricultural systems mark the surface at scales larger than the individual body. Aerial photography also removes the dialogue with a subject that had structured the family pictures. Where family members can participate in an agreement, the land cannot offer the same consent, raising a different ethical question about the photographer’s right to look. ^*4

Aerial vision has its own institutional history. In twentieth-century America, technologies for reading land from above as a continuous surface developed alongside military reconnaissance, mapping, agriculture, resource surveys, and land-use management. USGS historical research traces how aerial photography connected military and civilian surveying after World War I and expanded after the war into map revision and land-use analysis. ^*38 When photographing Hanford and the Nevada Test Site, Gowin treated the commanding view from above as historically loaded by surveying and control. Even when officials at the Nevada Test Site offered existing negatives, he chose to fly himself and determine altitude and angle on location. ^*1 Borrowing a viewpoint close to the systems of management that made nuclear sites, extraction, and irrigation possible, he redirected the same aerial perspective toward examining the consequences left on the land. ^*30 Aerial photography developed for military and surveying purposes was thus turned toward reading the scars that those systems of control had inscribed on the earth. ^*9

Baldwin Street: Photographing Family Through Time

The photographs made on Baldwin Street in Danville follow Edith’s family over a long period beginning in the 1960s.^*11 The same faces, gardens, interiors, nude bodies, growing children, and aging relatives reappear across years, allowing family relationships to be read through differences among repeated images. In what the National Gallery of Art calls the “serial portrait,” one person is not represented by a single picture; variation among portraits becomes a measure of time.^*22 Across a long project, the distance between subject and photographer also changes. From the young couple in the early images to later family portraits, composition, printing, and degrees of staging shift gradually. The evolving relationship itself becomes the time of the series. ^{*19 *24}

The same people recur on Baldwin Street, but bodies, homes, photographic techniques, and mutual consent all change over time. Repetition therefore accumulates portraits together with a history of changing relationships. Recent archival work has revealed many alternative expressions, failed attempts, and ordinary scenes surrounding the small number of pictures long treated as canonical.^*3 The depth of the archive shifts Gowin’s intimacy away from the miracle of a single moment and toward time spent together. Intimacy emerges through the repeated cycle of photographing the same people, showing them the results, and photographing them again. The work depends on Edith and her family accepting the camera over decades, sometimes performing, sometimes refusing, while continuing to share their lives. ^{*2 *21}

Changing the Earth and Moths: Damage and Biological Difference

Changing the Earth (2002) brings together aerial views of mines, nuclear sites, agriculture, and natural disasters. ^*12 Mining pits, nuclear-test craters, and circles of irrigated farmland belong to very different systems on the ground, yet from above they begin to align as geometries that turn land into a manageable surface. ^{*26 *33} Photographing military sites, extraction, and agriculture from comparable distances allows Gowin to compare the forms different social systems leave on the earth. Yet the abstract beauty of the images can also distance human suffering and labor, inviting destruction to be viewed as pattern. The series draws its tension from beauty and violence occupying the same frame. ^*16

Gowin accepted “terrible beauty” as a contradiction within photography itself, bringing attraction to beautiful form into conflict with knowledge of the violence that produced it.^*35 His account of recognizing the nuclear history of Hanford while flying over it likewise shows how formal patterns in the landscape led him back toward the institutions that produced them.^*30 Aerial photographs work at a different pace from posters that denounce destruction directly. Viewers may first be drawn to form, then learn the name and history of the site and revise the conditions under which that beauty was perceived. Beginning in 2001, Gowin also photographed more than a thousand species of moths in color in Central and South America.^*3 In the moth photographs, minute differences of pattern, color, and species become visible as evidence of a living environment’s diversity. More recent works combine silhouettes of Edith with moths, reconnecting the family pictures and ecological subjects within the longer arc of his practice.^*3 Gowin accumulated hundreds and then thousands of differences among moths instead of selecting one as a “representative species.” Where the aerial photographs address the immense marks of nuclear test sites and mines, the moth series moves close to small differences in wing color, pattern, and contour. From craters at a test site to markings on a moth’s wing, the scale changes but the effort to read transformation through form remains consistent. Moving between vast land surfaces and minute insects, Gowin developed a view of the environment shaped by both damage and biological difference.

Family and Aerial Photography: Intimacy, Damage, and the Ethics of Looking

Gowin’s family photographs belong to the broader 1970s shift that brought home, marriage, children, and nudity into the center of art photography. In Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, MoMA treated the home as a place where desire, power, and anxiety intersect.^*28 Gowin repeatedly photographs particular family members, houses, and bodies, opening their specificity to public viewing without turning them into generic symbols. Comparison with later photographers such as Sally Mann makes clear that closeness to a subject and authority over publication are separate issues.^*32 In Gowin’s work, long collaboration and the slowness of the large-format camera remain visible as working conditions, placing intimate photographs between staging and observation shared by both sides. Before the 1970s, family photographs circulated largely through albums and commemorative uses in private life. By moving intimate images into museums and photobooks, Gowin made the question of whose home is being viewed, and by whom, a public one.^*5 Making private photographs public changed both the status of the subject and the conditions under which one person’s life could be viewed by another. As intimate images associated with the family album entered museums, intimacy itself became a subject that questioned the viewer’s rights and responsibilities. ^{*15 *34 *36}

In the aerial photographs, visual pleasure and ethical unease overlap in a different form. High Country News has likewise discussed the risk of wounds in the earth appearing as seductive abstractions. ^*31 What first attracts the eye may be the beauty of a crater or mine. Once the site is identified, however, the same form is reread as a trace of nuclear testing, extraction, or contamination. ^*6 The family photographs produce a comparable reversal: after being drawn toward the intimate gestures of Edith and her relatives, viewers are reminded that they are looking into another family’s private life. ^*35 Bodies and land are radically different subjects, yet both bodies of work draw viewers in and then ask what they are looking at and by what right. By shifting from an Ansel Adams–like ideal of untouched natural beauty toward land transformed by military activity, extraction, and agriculture, Gowin also changed the ethical object of landscape photography. ^*33 Beneath the shift from family to environment runs a consistent refusal to separate the pleasure of looking from the responsibilities that accompany it. ^*37