Gowin, Emmet - Photographs (New in plastic!)

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.

For the production of the 2009 edition the photographs were scanned at Steidls digital darkroom from vintage prints. Without changing the size of the images, the book format was slightly increased.

Emmet Gowin (born 1941) is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photographs of derelict industrial factories, damaged agricultural fields, and nuclear plants places that had been changed by humans or nature in different locations around the world, including the Hanford Site, Mount St. Helens, and the Nevada Test Site. “There are things in your life that only you will see, stories that only you will hear. If you don’t tell them or write them down, if you don’t make the picture, these things will not be seen, these things will not be heard,” he has said.

Today, the photographer’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Publisher: Steidl; 1st edition (23 march 2009)

Language: English

Hardcover: 110 pages

ISBN-10: 3865218636

ISBN-13: 978-3865218636

Item weight: 892 g

Dimensions: 24.64 x 2.03 x 26.67 cm

(New in plastic!)