Married, With Camera

Portraitist Emmet Gowin's most enduring subject is his wife

  • By David Zax
  • Smithsonian magazine, December 2007, Subscribe
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Shell look at me and see the way Im looking at her and shell know Gowin says. I just get up and go get the camera. "She'll look at me and see the way I'm looking at her, and she'll know," Gowin says. "I just get up and go get the camera."

Emmet and Edith Gowin / Pace MacGill Gallery, New York

 

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    Gowin says his landscapes (<i>Pivot Agriculture, Washington, 1987</i>) are about "tracing out all the lines humans have etched."

    Married, With Camera

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    He wasn't like the other Danville boys, Edith recalls. He looked sharp that night in 1961, clad entirely in black for the dance at the Y; later, she learned that he listened to jazz and classical music. Emmet Gowin wanted to be an artist but was having trouble finding a subject. In Edith Morris, he did. They married three years later, and Gowin went on to make his first photographs of Edith and her extended family.

    It was a welcoming family, and a large one, clustered in five houses on a Danville, Virginia, cul-de-sac. By 1971, when this picture was taken, Edith and Emmet had the first of their two sons, Elijah (playing with a train set), and five nephews and nieces (one of whom appears in a blur near the train tracks). Each year, gifts for nearly 20 people would be piled at the foot of a Christmas tree, a young cedar that Emmet would cut from the nearby woods. By mid-morning, the living room floor would be a wasteland of torn wrapping paper. "It would pretty much look like that every Christmas," Edith remembers.

    Neither Edith nor Emmet can recall the precise circumstances that led to this photograph, but they know the process well. "She'll look at me and see the way I'm looking at her, and she'll know," he says. "I don't even say anything, I just get up and go get the camera."

    "What he'll do is just stare a little bit," she says, "and I know to keep the feeling I have there, whether it's a solemnness or whether it's a glee in my eye—whatever it is, to not get into another mood."

    Other photographers have taken their spouses as subjects. Gowin's mentor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Harry Callahan, made abstract pictures of his wife, Eleanor; Alfred Stieglitz said the countless pictures he took of Georgia O'Keeffe formed a single portrait. But Gowin's pictures—with Edith's characteristically defiant, tomboyish air, often tempered by an ethereal light—are anything but derivative. The couple's collaboration launched a distinguished career: Gowin's family photographs earned him fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work has been published in three monographs and featured in numerous museum collections. For the past 34 years, he has taught at Princeton University.

    For many years Gowin was content to take pictures mostly of Edith and her family, but that began to change in the early '70s, with the deaths of Edith's grandmother and two of her uncles. With three of his most beloved in-laws gone, Gowin felt diminished.

    When he returned to visit with Edith's family for Christmas in 1973, he saw that some of the children had built a treehouse in the yard. "I just out of curiosity climbed up," he says. "One plank had fallen out, and right in that spot there was a marvelous view, about 12 or 15 feet off the ground." He wedged his camera through the gap and took the only picture possible. It turned out to be a beautiful image, framed by snow-covered branches, looking out at the home of Edith's deceased grandmother. He remembers feeling that "just getting up to a high place changed and liberated your vision."

    That picture became the bridge between Gowin's early work and the sort of photography that has absorbed him for the past few decades. Since 1980, he has devoted himself largely to aerial landscapes—strip mining in the Czech Republic, farm fields in Kansas, apartment complexes in Jerusalem. These photographs, without a human being in sight, might seem a radical departure, but Gowin says no, they are "records of human action." He is not interested in photographing pristine wildernesses, he adds, but in "tracing out all the lines humans have etched" in the land.


    He wasn't like the other Danville boys, Edith recalls. He looked sharp that night in 1961, clad entirely in black for the dance at the Y; later, she learned that he listened to jazz and classical music. Emmet Gowin wanted to be an artist but was having trouble finding a subject. In Edith Morris, he did. They married three years later, and Gowin went on to make his first photographs of Edith and her extended family.

    It was a welcoming family, and a large one, clustered in five houses on a Danville, Virginia, cul-de-sac. By 1971, when this picture was taken, Edith and Emmet had the first of their two sons, Elijah (playing with a train set), and five nephews and nieces (one of whom appears in a blur near the train tracks). Each year, gifts for nearly 20 people would be piled at the foot of a Christmas tree, a young cedar that Emmet would cut from the nearby woods. By mid-morning, the living room floor would be a wasteland of torn wrapping paper. "It would pretty much look like that every Christmas," Edith remembers.

    Neither Edith nor Emmet can recall the precise circumstances that led to this photograph, but they know the process well. "She'll look at me and see the way I'm looking at her, and she'll know," he says. "I don't even say anything, I just get up and go get the camera."

    "What he'll do is just stare a little bit," she says, "and I know to keep the feeling I have there, whether it's a solemnness or whether it's a glee in my eye—whatever it is, to not get into another mood."

    Other photographers have taken their spouses as subjects. Gowin's mentor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Harry Callahan, made abstract pictures of his wife, Eleanor; Alfred Stieglitz said the countless pictures he took of Georgia O'Keeffe formed a single portrait. But Gowin's pictures—with Edith's characteristically defiant, tomboyish air, often tempered by an ethereal light—are anything but derivative. The couple's collaboration launched a distinguished career: Gowin's family photographs earned him fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work has been published in three monographs and featured in numerous museum collections. For the past 34 years, he has taught at Princeton University.

    For many years Gowin was content to take pictures mostly of Edith and her family, but that began to change in the early '70s, with the deaths of Edith's grandmother and two of her uncles. With three of his most beloved in-laws gone, Gowin felt diminished.

    When he returned to visit with Edith's family for Christmas in 1973, he saw that some of the children had built a treehouse in the yard. "I just out of curiosity climbed up," he says. "One plank had fallen out, and right in that spot there was a marvelous view, about 12 or 15 feet off the ground." He wedged his camera through the gap and took the only picture possible. It turned out to be a beautiful image, framed by snow-covered branches, looking out at the home of Edith's deceased grandmother. He remembers feeling that "just getting up to a high place changed and liberated your vision."

    That picture became the bridge between Gowin's early work and the sort of photography that has absorbed him for the past few decades. Since 1980, he has devoted himself largely to aerial landscapes—strip mining in the Czech Republic, farm fields in Kansas, apartment complexes in Jerusalem. These photographs, without a human being in sight, might seem a radical departure, but Gowin says no, they are "records of human action." He is not interested in photographing pristine wildernesses, he adds, but in "tracing out all the lines humans have etched" in the land.

    And though Gowin's focus has shifted, he has never stopped photographing Edith, who is now 64, nor does he intend to. "I wanted to pay attention to the body and personality that had agreed out of love to reveal itself," Gowin wrote in 1976. Now, at age 65, he says, "My life as an artist follows so closely my meeting Edith and my love for her that I can think of no way of seeing these two separately."

    Former Smithsonian intern David Zax is a writing fellow at Moment magazine.

    Books
    Emmet Gowin: Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990 (out of print)
    Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth, Aerial Photographs by Jock Reynolds, Yale University Art Gallery, 2002
     


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    Comments (6)

    Hello, again, I am hoping there are prints of this 1971 Christmas photo available for purchase. Are there? Thanks, Jan Cronkhite

    Posted by Jan Cronkhite on December 5,2007 | 01:07 PM

    Hello, this Christmas picture is the best apres-christmas evocation I have ever seen, well, since The Christmas Story. I would love to be able to buy Christmas cards with this image. What fun!!!! The Cowins must have a great sense of humor. I love the slightly bent tree top. Thanks for this definately "Indelible Image". Very Sincerely, Jan Cronkhite

    Posted by Jan Cronkhite on December 5,2007 | 12:58 PM

    Hello, this Christmas picture is the best apres-christmas evocation I have ever seen, well, since The Christmas Story. I would love to be able to buy Christmas cards with this image. What fun!!!! The Cowins must have a great sense of humor. I love the slightly bent tree top. Thanks for this definately "Indelible Image". Very Sincerely, Jan Cronkhite

    Posted by Jan Cronkhite on December 5,2007 | 12:57 PM

    I noticed the Hot Wheels Super Charger Set on the floor which the author mistook for a train set. Also next to the supercharger box is a Hot Wheels Drag Chute Set. I got the same supercharger toy for xmas that same year or maybe the year before (1970). I still have the box it came in.

    Posted by Tom H. on November 27,2007 | 08:20 PM

    Train?!? Mr. Zax must be much younger (or significantly older) than the boys in the Christmas mess photo. That is a classic Hot Wheels oval track with a Super Charger attached. The Super Charger had been introduced a couple years prior to the Christmas documented in the photo. The Super Charger contained motorized wheels spinning parallel to the floor which would grab the Hot Wheels car and sling it around the track - hopefully with enough force to feed the car back into the Super Charger to zoom around the track again and again. I know that I am not alone having retained my Hot Wheels. And I bet that some of my peers will see that photo and dust off their cars and maybe even their tracks.

    Posted by Albert Happel on November 26,2007 | 08:52 PM

    The object David Zax identifies as a train set is actually a Hot Wheels track set, with the car not visible. The house looking-object the track runs through is a battery powered "power house" which used a pair of foam-covered spinning wheels to accelerate the cars along the track.

    Posted by Jonathan on November 26,2007 | 07:48 PM

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