Gowin, Emmet, 1941-

Emmet Gowin is an American photographer known for his broad range of subjects, including moths, his wife, and landscapes. “There are things in your life that only you will see, stories that only you will hear. If you don’t tell them or write them down, if you don’t make the picture, these things will not be seen, these things will not be heard,” he has said. Born on December 22, 1941 in Danville, VA, he studied at the Richmond Professional Institute and received his MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967. Studying under Harry Callahan at RISD, Gowin adopted his professor’s penchant of using his wife as a model for photographs. By the 1980s, the artist’s work had expanded to include aerial photography of derelict industrial factories, damaged agricultural fields, and nuclear plants, in different locations around the world. These works hint at Gowin’s fascination with finding beauty in areas devastated by manmade and natural disasters. He currently lives and works in Newtown, PA. Today, the photographer’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.