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For six decades, Emmet Gowin has contemplated humanity's relationship to the natural world with visual wonderment. His photographs have evolved from intimate portraits of his wife, Edith Morris, and their Virginia family, to aerial vistas of nuclear test sites and scientific surveys of tropical ecosystems and their dependent biodiversity. He has created formally abstract, luminous compositions depicting the volcanic devastation of Washington’s Mount St. Helens; the chemical contamination of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington; pivot irrigation agriculture in Kansas; the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic; and most recently, the Spanish province of Granada. Gowin received a 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, Providence, in 1967. He served on the faculty of Princeton University, New Jersey, as a professor of photography in the Visual Arts Program from 1973 until his retirement in 2009. Gowin is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1977, 1979), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1994), the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University (1997), and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, Princeton University (2006). In 2024, the Princeton University Art Museum acquired the artist’s archive, which spans six decades of artmaking and will continue to grow as his career continues. Gowin’s work is held in important public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, among many others.
