Emmet Gowin
				American, born 1941
		Website about the artist: www.geh.org
			Introduction
			Emmet Gowin grew up in southern Virginia. He began photographing in 1961, at the Richmond Professional Institute, and went on to graduate study at the Rhode Island School of Design. His prints have been exhibited widely and are in the collections of museums and galleries throughout the United States. Gowin lives with his wife, Edith, and their sons, Isaac and Elijah, in a small Pennsylvania town and teaches photography at Princeton University. His books include Emmet Gowin: Photographs (1976), Emmet Gowin Photographs (1966-1983), Petra (1986), and Emmet Gowin: Aerial Photographs (1997). One of America’s foremost photographers Gowin’s first subjects were taken from his own world his wife, children, and extended family in Virginia. Newer experiences have drawn him toward a wider view, encompassing landscapes of Europe, the devastation and beauty of Mt St Helens, the haunting emptiness of Petra, and most recently aerial views of mines, toxic waste dumps, nuclear test sites, and massive agricultural projects. The landscape of Emmet Gowin's photographs is one of cruel beauty. Gowin, high above his subjects, photographs the gold mines, open coal pits, battlefields and atomic test sites which have scarred the earth's skin. From his God-like perch, these assaults on nature take on a transcendent, abstract quality. Poisoned lakes reflect cloudless skies. Half domes are pressed into the land like dimples. Stripes of blackened earth unfurl across the landscape like streaks of modernist abstraction rendered on a global scale. The richly toned palette of Gowin's black and white photographs lends his images a severe elegance. They seem almost immorally gorgeous -- like a kind of hideous but alluring scarification. That the earth has survived the attacks Gowin's photographs describe -- a description as candid as forensic evidence -- is as much a testament to the planet's strength as to our folly as a species. To date, three monographs have been published on his work and his photographs are in museum collections internationally, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Art, the George Eastman House in Rochester, Espace Photographic de Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum fo American Art in New York.