Homage to Emmet Gowin 2

Maureen Shaughnessy

In Homage To...

Emmet Gowin

The Photographer's Own Statement from Emmet Gowin: Photographs:

The photographs of Eugene Atget, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Alfred Stieglitz, and especially Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer have influenced me. I accept and embrace this tradition of photography, yet always I want to make my own pictures and follow my intuition.

My pictures are made as a part of everyday life and are not the result of any project or assignment. Most of the pictures here were made with a camera on a tripod. In this situation, both the sitter and photographer become part of the picture. Sometimes my photographs resemble home snapshots, which are among the richest resources of images I know. But I always want to make a picture that is more than a family record. I feel that the clearest pictures were at first strange to me; yet whatever picture an artist makes, it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

As I worked, I soon realized that I was not able to foresee the best pictures and often could not identify the better negative until much later. This meant that in my future efforts there would be an element dedicated to what can't be foreseen - to risk and to chance. (It turns out that "the unknown is more friendly than we think"; as D. H. Lawrence said, "Even an artist knows that his work was never in his mind, he could never have thought it before it happened" Rarely am I tempted to speak of originality.) I far prefer the formulation "I am the origin of this work" That simply means that I am responsible for it - that I accept the consequences.

About the circular pictures: I had quite forgotten that it was the nature of the lens to form a circle and in 1967 my only lens was a short Angulon intended for a small camera. I'd been given an old Eastman View 8 x 10 and brought the two together out of impatience and curiosity. After a while, I recognized the wonderful exaggeration near the edge. I began to use the camera with this lens, but for several years I would trim these prints so that the circle was disguised. Eventually I realized that such a lens contributed to a particular description of space and that the circle itself was already a powerful form.

Accepting the entire circle, what the camera had made, was important to me. It involved a recognition of the inherent nature of things. I had set out to describe the world within my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do, Now I would prefer to say: As things teach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world.

Source: Masters of Photography

Links:

Excellent review of Gowin's work at Masters of Photography.