Here's a deep treasure fished out of photography's recent past, rescued and revived by Steidl and the Pace McGill Gallery (where there was a show of the work this past spring). Emmet Gowin: Photographs
is another of my long-time favorite photobooks, available once again, after many years, in a lovely new reprint. A straightlaced young man from a strict upbringing married into a more freewheeling, open, and expressive family and made art of the collision, with the fully open eyes of one who belongs but sees everything as if it were new (and astonishing). A book made out of the energy of young love and new freedom, and ambition.
In retrospect this is something of a period piece. The sparse highlights pulled up out of the inky blacks is a printing style that now looks very '70s. Gowin includes Sommeresque landscapes, extreme wide angles, the dense, textured, flat-field arrays that would preoccupy his later work, and a Callahan-like
extended portrait of his wife Edith. But it's the snapshot-made-art quality of his new family's faces, bodies, activities, environs, and lives that are the core of the book. Lives and deaths, I should say.
Some of the pictures were made with a medium-format lens mounted on a view camera, making the pictures circular, with the areas outside the image circle carefully burned to gray or black by the photographer (who had the reputation of being a virtuoso printer). The effect is like a keyhole, or like a peephole in a door, although we're looking in, not out. It enhances the feeling that we're seeing something private and essential.
I knew this book very well as a student, and in the mid '80s I got to meet Edith Gowin. I told friends at the time that it was like meeting Lincoln, another famous subject of many photographs. To me she had a legendary quality. She spoke, however, in a high-pitched voice with more than a trace of a mountain twang, her words full of warmth and generosity. (Lincoln, too, is described by contemporaries as having a peculiar-sounding, high-pitched voice.) Not at all like the imposing, vivid, and somewhat dark figure, half wild lover, half earth mother, that inhabits the book.
Emmet Gowin: Photographs contains one of my all-time favorite pictures, too, called Nancy, a picture that could neither be simpler nor more rare. (Reproduced in this article from a while back.)
I'll probably have to get the new edition, which is very faithful to the old one but better made (and hardcover). Even though I must say I don't like the new cover. The edition I have, in paperback, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. It cost me $4.47, which means I bought it used. I got it perhaps four or five years after it came out. One of the essential books in my library. I look at it every year. A book that's grown with me, like a much-loved piece of music.
(Here's the U.K. link.)
Oh, yes indeed... Giants walked the earth clutching cameras in those far-off days. Gowin's contribution to the Lustrum Press collection "Darkroom 2" (1978) gives a fascinating account of both his darkroom practice and his relationship with Frederick Sommer.
My personal favourite is still "Ice Fish", the original cover. I suspect not enough people will have the appropriate reaction to your sentence "I got to meet Edith Gowin"... That's at least the second name you've dropped that's really made me sit up. The other I can recall was a while ago when you wrote something like "my friend John Gossage". As my daughter would so eloquently put it, I'm like, OMG WTF.
Posted by: Mike C. | Sunday, 28 June 2009 at 12:38 PM
Here is an interview with Emmet, Edith pops in as well, on J.P. Caponigro's site.
http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/gowin.php
Some nice thoughts on art, serendipity, and spirituality.
Posted by: Bron Janulis | Sunday, 28 June 2009 at 05:36 PM
This was one of the first books of photography I really looked at--and read about and wrote about while at university ten or so years ago. And I agree, Nancy is a very powerful image. So it is nice to know that I can now, at last, afford a copy!
Posted by: Sean | Monday, 29 June 2009 at 06:20 AM