emmet gowin

I've been looking more in depth at Emett Gowin's imagery and it is his earlier portraits of his wife and family that draw me in the most. 

Gowin, Emmet. Ruth & Edith. Danville, Virginia. 1966.

I think my attraction to him as an artist is because he was at the same stage in his family life then - that I am now. I do think that as soon as you have children you naturally begin to reflect on your family and childhood and what makes us who we are. You also think a lot more about how to treat people and how you want your children to treat others.  I found this except from an interview with him by John Paul Caponigro in 1998 taken when Gowin was 57 yrs old.


"It’s odd to me now when I think back on the kind of person I was 25 years ago, making pictures of Edith’s family and so forth. I felt then that if pictures weren’t of people, they weren’t about what was really important. Behavior, our behavior, that’s what’s important. The way we treat children is what matters. How to pass from being a child oneself into being an adult, and how to treat children so that they become adults, proper adults, that would have been it. So my idea then was, why would you want to study anything else?" Emmet Gowin 1998

Gowin, Emmet. Edith and Elijah. Danville, Virginia. 1968.

Aside from his obvious love for his family and home and respect for them......some of the other things I love about his work is the light and dark he manages to capture in each frame. The beautiful depth and contrast between the blacks and whites. Also his total love and devotion for his wife which is almost like an obsession - following her around and clearly annoying her at times wanting to document her body and form, like a hunger for her. 

Gowin, Emmet. Edith. Danville, Virginia, 1973

I like that he often puts his characters in the middle of the frame, perhaps to say they are more important than anything else in the scene. I also like his use of shooting in door frames with the darkness behind and the skin illuminated by the light but not overexposed so you can still see the texture and shadows.
I'm also drawn to Gowin's work because of his philosophy towards his art and how he thinks good art is created.....


"It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we’re quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that’s useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can’t know exactly what it is we are doing." Emmet Gowin 1998.



Interestingly - before I started this degree I felt very strongly about maintaining a lack of influence from other people and their art. In the hope that I could be true to my own original thoughts and talent or lack of it. It has been challenging for me, once I have started, to find out that such extensive research and informing of others work is what is expected of us. But strangely enough........Gowin was the first artist (and indeed the only artist so far out of all the slide lists and the recommended reading I have looked at in the library) to really capture my interest strongly and it excites me to find out he is also someone who believes in chance and in not fully understanding or manipulating their art. 


It’s difficult to say why I personally feel such a need to underwrite chance. I certainly believe in imaginative invention, but I also know how important it is to be open to chance, which is always the most creative of forces. Perhaps, also, it is simply the strong feeling I have about my own work, that it all, somehow, amid my own struggles, appeared almost out of nowhere, as a gift. 


The fact that we are not in control is what’s so good about it. Because if we could control everything perfectly, we would lose the newness and bring ourselves back to where things answer to the authority that we are subjectively impregnated with. We just can’t rid ourselves of this sense of authority. And that’s very close to the parental deal, too. 
'Interview with Emmet Gowin'. 1998. Web. http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/09/theory-interview-with-emmet-gowin.html

Gowin, Emmet. Nancy. Danville, Virginia. 1965

He does however go on to say that when doing his apprenticeship years ago he practised others techniques and used inspiration from their methods to assist in developing his own skills until he was ready to depart from them fully and produce his own authentic work that reflected his time and his place in the world. I like this idea.