As the war in Vietnam tore at the fabric of American life, and the civil rights movement cut across family lines, Emmet Gowin, was a married man in his mid twenties, and studying photography at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Born in 1941, in Danville, Virginia,Gowin found inspiration during the turbulent sixties in his wife, Edith Morris, whom he photographed regularly with a 35 mm camera. The early black and white images of Edith are ephemeral and capture a domestic bliss hemmed in by gardens and hedged against the encroaching consumerism of the “American dream.”
There is solace in Gowin’s nudes of Edith and they convey an intimacy of both womanhood and motherhood: powerful themes which would converge in the future work of this aspiring photographer. In an interview with The Guardian, Gowin later remarks: “If you set out to make pictures about love, it can’t be done. But you can make pictures, and you can be in love. In that way, people sense the authenticity of what you do.”
As one of the most original photographers of the last forty years, Gowin occupies a prominent position in the history of the photography of the second half of the twentieth century. The creation of an extensive body of original work offered him an influential position among the ivy leaguers, Princeton University, and the establishment where he would stay until retirement in 2009.
The Erwin Gowin exhibition at the Banco de la República’s Museum of Art is one of the most comprehensive retrospectives to date, and offers viewers a unique insight into the different creative stages of this master’s work, allowing audiences to also appreciate Gowin’s vision of reality, from the most intimate to the most universal. As the photographer states: “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.”
Sponsored by the Mapfre Foundation and curated by the Spanish art historian Carlos Gollonet, the first time showing in Colombia of 192 photographs by Gowin – taken between 1963 and 2005 – is an important milestone for the Banco de la República’s impressive repertoire of art exhibitions and highlights this cultural entity’s commitment in putting documentary photog- raphy at the forefront of the nation’s cultural agenda. Before making its way to Bogotá, the exhibition was shown at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris.
During his first decade as a photographer, Gowin worked with a rangefinder Leica and a 4” x 5” bellows camera. In the early 1970’s, a fortuitous incident led him to use the lens of his previous camera on an 8” x 10” camera, and this combination produced a number of circular images that suggested a new perspective full of secrecy and mystery.
The Gowin exhibition is chrono- logically presented and begins with everyday scenes of family togetherness in Virginia. There is the influence in his early work of mentor and photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999). Gowin’s horizons broaden – and landscape and aerial photography – become dominant themes in his later work. There are images of the devastation caused by the eruption of Mount St. Helens and sweeping silver-tinted prints of the impact caused by mining in the American midwest.
As much of an academic as a master storyteller, the Emmet Gowin exhibition touches on important themes, such as the impact of industrialization on agriculture and how the untapped forces of nature can destroy all that we hold sacred: the sanctuary that is family.
Museo de Arte BanRep / Calle 11 no. 4-21
