Emmet Gowin, Professor Emeritus of Photography of Princeton University and a member of Newtown Meeting, will speak about his latest works via Zoom to the adult class of Newtown Quaker Meeting at 9:45 a.m. on Sunday, May 9, 2021. Zoom Meeting for Worship in the manner of Friends will follow at 11 a.m.
Gowin will give a quick overview of his past work in order to place in context the book on which he is now working, The One Hundred Circle Farm. Gowin’s previous books have received rave reviews, e.g. Mariposas Nocturnas published in 2017 was called “stunning,” “brilliant,” “spectacular,” and “an object of beauty and a document of inestimable value.”
For six decades, 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 extended Virginia family, to aerial vistas of nuclear test sites, to scientific surveys of tropical ecosystems and their dependent biodiversity. He has created formally abstract, luminous compositions of the volcanic devastation of Washington’s Mount St. Helens, the chemical contamination of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, pivot irrigation agriculture in Kansas, the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic, and most recently, the Spanish province of Granada.
Emmet said he will discuss “the transition from the intimate nature of those first photographs with the most recent series of photographs of agriculture on an industrial scale and the amazing beauty and form of the agricultural pivot, which is also related to the rapid and irreplaceable loss of water in the Ogalala aquifer.”
Gowin added, “Many Quaker Meeting members know that Edith has been the inspiration and subject for many of the best of my photographs for many years. Since Sunday is also Mother’s Day, this is a subject on which I will also touch, at least lightly.”
Gowin is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Friends of Photography Peer Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in 1997 and the Behrman Award in 2006.
Emmet Gowin is Professor of Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Born in Danville, Virginia, he has been teaching at Princeton since 1973. His work is represented by the Pave/MacGill Gallery in New York.
Emmet Gowin and his wife, Edith, live in Newtown.