Interviews
How Emmet Gowin Defines Intimacy in Photography
Since the 1960s, Gowin has made portraits of stunning openness, recorded scenes of environmental devastation, and explored the marvels of biodiversity. His concern, he says, is about showing how we belong to the earth.
Emmet Gowin came to photography via a teenage revelation in a dentist’s office in Danville, Virginia. It was the late 1950s. Flipping through magazines in the waiting room, the minister’s son landed on an Ansel Adams photograph of a burned tree stump sprouting fresh shoots. Out loud, he exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, this is the Christ.” Now, Gowin says, “Thank God nobody else was there. But to me, it was clear. This was the transformation of death into life.” He went home and asked to borrow the family camera.
Gowin would first become known for his stunningly open and intimate photographs of his wife, Edith, and her extended family in 1960s and 1970s rural Virginia, pictures Robert Adams has described as “a lovely testament of close-in wonder and affection.” While Gowin cites Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer as guiding influences, of his wife, he claims: “I was already a full version of me when I met Edith, but I am ten times me because of her.” In the 1980s, Gowin’s scope shifted and grew concentrically outward, focusing on environmental devastation—both natural, as in the case of Mount St. Helens, or by human hand, as with the Nevada test sites for atomic weapons. Other series, on colorful nocturnal moths and forests in Central and South America, explore the marvels of biodiversity.
It is possible to think of Gowin’s early pictures, and the nuclear sites that occupied his consciousness long before he was able to photograph them, as metaphors for light and shadow: “Emmet Gowin is an artist who bears witness to wholeness in beauty and violence. He understands that one cannot exist without the other,” wrote his friend Terry Tempest Williams.
Princeton University, where Gowin is professor emeritus, recently announced that its art museum will acquire Gowin’s archive, which includes more than six hundred fifty photographs (and will continue to grow as he makes new work), some seven thousand contact sheets, negatives, book maquettes, and correspondence. Recently, I spoke with Gowin from his home in Pennsylvania.
Rebecca Bengal: You’ve been through various periods of reflection when it comes to curating major retrospective exhibitions of your work. How is this time different? What kind of discoveries do you make when revisiting your pictures as an archive?
Emmet Gowin: I had a trick in class when it was the day to make the first print: each student would choose an image from a film roll we’d made together, and that was their print. Meanwhile, I’d always go through my own material and find something I made at their age—not terribly special, just interesting enough to print. Sometimes, once the print was made, I would realize, Oh, it’s much more than I expected. The poet Wendell Berry says that good work, after it’s done, takes yet more time to prove its worth, and you’re not really in charge. You’re not the final arbiter of that.
Even before organizing the archive, it was the pandemic period that really turned me into a student of my own work. I started over again, at the beginning. I had a lot of time, and I began to print things I’d tried to print when I was young but didn’t have the skill. I was looking back at the innocent family backyard pictures that we made all our lives. They weren’t quite super art, but they’re the real, intimate, nuanced moments.
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Bengal: Super art?
Gowin: Well, “super art” is a kind of shorthand. In many ways, I think our task as human beings all boils down to what we do every day. It’s what you do every day that counts. You go through days of simple activities, finding an old print, and refining it somehow, or just reminding yourself that it’s worth more time and attention. It’s really little increments of behavior that form a kind of aesthetic life. We get a sense of who we are by the way we treat the most ordinary things.
When I unfold a word, or a concept like super art, I’m contrasting the responsibility we hold on to every day, to the life and meaning and fulfillment that you take. I ran out first thing this morning before coffee to check on my little peony that I grafted last fall, and its little leaves are coming up out of the ground. And I’m so exhilarated and thrilled with that process that the day brings me joy. That’s very analogous to the artist’s life as I have experienced it. You just do the things you do as well as you can, and then, you get out of the way.
I had a lot of time, and I began to print things I’d tried to print when I was young but didn’t have the skill.
Bengal: I want to pose a question to you that you raised in a talk you gave in 2013. You said: “What is that quality of intimacy that we love in a picture?”
Gowin: You know, I was drifting into the crowd after that talk when an older man rushed up to me and asked, “Why are you the way you are?” I thought, Wow, that’s not just a bold question, that’s an impertinent question. But what I said was, “It’s very simple. I think it’s because I always wanted to be just like my mother.” I think intimacy is what you cannot tell your mother. It’s what your mother already knows. From the moment we were married, Edith and I made the conscious decision that we would not show the pictures we were making to my parents. That was our intimacy. What I could barely talk about to anyone somehow comes out in a picture. That is what intimacy amounts to in images. It’s something that you can barely speak of, and yet, it’s the most important thing in the world.
Bengal: That reminds me of a photograph of yours, one of Edith when you’re visiting her relatives in Virginia, where, just out of sight of her family, she flashes open her top to the camera.
Gowin: There was also a version where we were at her great-grandmother’s house, and, while rocking back and forth, her great-grandmother was in this rhythm of asking questions, as she dipped snuff. Edith’s impulse and the great-grandmother’s leaning forward to spit the snuff into a can were in synchronicity, and there was the picture. One evening, Edith was in her mother’s bedroom, taking a kind of simple bath from a pan of hot water on the stove. She’d gotten herself naked and was washing off with a washcloth, and I got my 16mm film camera. I’m sitting on the floor filming, when her mother walked in, took one look at the two of us, and says, “This is the right room. I’ve just picked the wrong moment.”
Bengal: Can you put into words what it is that you see in those moments when you ask Edith to stay as she is for a picture?
Gowin: I think about a picture I made of her from ’72, ’73, where she’s standing in a doorway. I remember asking her to, maybe, lift her arm just a little bit, some innocuous thing, and looking into the camera and feeling, This is as close to living perfection as I’m ever going to be. And she can’t hold this forever. She owns it, but it’s only ours for a little while. That struck me that day so powerfully. You’re always on the edge of that. Anything worthwhile is, in a way, something you’ll never see again.
Bengal: You’ve said before that the family pictures, the backyard images, are also, in their own way, war pictures.
Gowin: During the first week of graduate school, in 1965, I got a letter from the draft board saying to report to active duty. And it was during that trip to the board in Danville that I made a picture, at the behest of my niece, of her lying on the ground surrounded by her dolls. Harry Callahan called it my first photograph. He sensed that it wasn’t a picture about other pictures, but that it was a picture of the beating heart of life itself.
Our lives were in a kind of bracket surrounded by the Vietnam War, and our lives were conditioned by the war. It was made all the more vivid because the war was going on, and we knew we were not participating in it directly, but it affected everything in everybody’s life. It was the background against which those pictures happened.
Bengal: What prompted you to turn outward, to photograph beyond those intimate family pictures?
Gowin: Well, the world changes, and you change. There was a point when the patriarchs and matriarchs in Edith’s family started to die. I realized, Oh, I get the lesson of this. You can’t have the same subject your whole life.
In the 1980s, I was reading a lot of physics and a lot of Native American literature in which they refer to the awareness of “the long body.” The shaman would give instructions to the novitiate who’s getting ready to go up into the mountains for the vision quest, to fast and pray and wait for the vision to come—the awareness of how you started your life, and who you are now, and what you will be at the end of your life, in your imagination. The idea is that you live consciously aware of the continuum even though you’re in the moment. It embodies the day that Crazy Horse faced Custer; as the Lakota Sioux were leaving the village, they supposedly said to each other, “What a day to die.” What a consciousness of the beauty of the day I have in me now. Therefore, I can go to uncertainty.
All images courtesy the artist
Bengal: If war is subtext in your early family pictures, it becomes more visible, even eerie, in bodies of work such as the Nevada Test Site photographs (1996–97).
Gowin: That work began when I was able to photograph the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the plutonium for the first atomic bombs was “made.” When I first visited, it happened to be a rainy, gray, dark, ominous day. But as we flew over the site, for a minute, the sun came out, and it was like a feeling of forgiveness just swept over that awful place. And I thought, That’s right. The sun doesn’t care. The sun is not having thoughts about thermonuclear reactions. In fact, it is one. Immediately, I started wondering, What does the landscape look like where the bombs were tested?
Bengal: Your next project, Mariposas Nocturnas (1997–2015), is radically different in scope, embracing ecology, color, life. How consciously did that come about?
Gowin: I had gone with friends to Ecuador in 1997. I had always been interested in insects and nature in every manifestation, and my department chairman had found someone who would take us out in the forest and show us how to collect insects. Immediately, I felt the transposition of my feelings between the test site and being in the tropical forest: the smell of the forest and the wetness and the fear of it. It just seemed so exquisitely wonderful. I didn’t care if I ever went back to the test site again, though I actually would.
It liberated me to change direction. I was making a bit of a jump, but I had always felt that the transition from the family as subject to the rest was, in a way, a natural one. For me, the subject is just wherever the family occurs, the awareness of how we fit into the places around us, how we belong to the Earth. We went to England and to Ireland, to Italy, to the Czech Republic, to Jordan, to Granada. And I just kept at it.
This interview originally appeared in Aperture no. 256, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” guest edited by Deana Lawson.