Emmet Gowin Lecture

December 4, 2014
6:30pm: Keynote Lecture in Auditorium
7:30-10pm: Gala
New Orleans Museum of Art

Keynote Lecture + PhotoGALA Tickets:
$25 in advance/$30 at the door | Purchase here

Emmet Gowin is an internationally acclaimed photographer who initially earned recognition for his intimate portraits of his wife and family in rural Virginia. In his five-decade career he has also explored the devastation and beauty of the landscape, aerial scenes of man’s impact on the environment, and insects in South America.

For the PhotoNOLA 2014 keynote lecture Gowin will present an overview of his life’s work and involvement with photography, sharing stories about the influences, personalities, and ideas that have shaped his life and work.

Bio:
Emmet Gowin was born in Danville, Virginia in 1941. He obtained his BFA in graphic design from the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in 1965 and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1967. While at RISD, Gowin studied with Harry Callahan, who became a mentor and influence on his work. Gowin also developed a friendship with Frederic Sommer, whose ideas and work also affected him deeply.

Following his marriage to Edith Morris in 1964, Gowin began making photographs of Edith, his sons Elijah and Isaac, and Edith’s extended family in Danville, intimate portrayals of the small rituals of everyday life. During the 1970s, he began to make landscape photographs and since the mid-1980s, he has explored the use of aerial photography to document the impact of human intervention in the environment. Some of the issues addressed in this work include the impact of center pivot irrigation used in industrial-scale agriculture of the Great Plains; the effect of weapons testing on the environment near the Yucca Flats nuclear test site; and the impact of military occupation on Kuwait after the first Gulf War.

Over the course of his career, Emmet Gowin has received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the State of Pennsylvania, the Friends of Photography Peer Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. In 1997, Gowin was honored with the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 until his retirement in 2010. His work has been the subject of several monographs, including Emmet Gowin/Photographs (1976); Emmet Gowin: Photographs, 1966-1983, (1983); Emmet Gowin/Photographs: This Vegetable Earth Is But A Shadow (1990); Emmet Gowin: Aerial Photographs (1998); Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth (2002); Mariposas Nocturnas – Edith in Panama (2006); and Emmet Gowin (2013).

Emmet Gowin’s work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and abroad and the subject of a mid-career retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Art Museum (1990-1993), a comprehensive exhibition organized by the Yale University Art Gallery (2002-2004) and a retrospective at the Fundación Mapfre, Madrid (2013). Emmet Gowin’s work is collected by public institutions worldwide including: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Books will be available for purchase through the NOMA Museum Shop, and Mr. Gowin will be available to sign them after the lecture.