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Emmet Gowin Biography

Emmet Gowin (born 1941 in Danville, Virginia) is an American photographer. He first gained attention in the 1970s with his intimate portraits of his wife, Edith, and her family. Later he turned his attention to the landscapes of the American West, taking aerial photographs of places that had been changed by humans or nature, including the Hanford Site, Mount St. Helens, and the Nevada Test Site. Gowin taught at Princeton University for 25 years.

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Emmet Gowin Quotes

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.

Knows, Photographer, Photography, Represent, Things, Tools

For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.

Communication, Holding, Intensely, Mean, Moments, Pictures

I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see. "

Looks, Photograph, Photographs, See, Thing, Want

What's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realize you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us.

Comfortable, Photography, Risk, Secret, Taken

The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

Heart, Idea, Ideas, Life, Lived, Photography

Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am. '

Art, Butterfly, Photography, Things, Way, Wings

Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

Creativity, Feelings, Know, Photography, World

I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.

Already, Interesting, Photography, Realized, World

I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously.

Images, Photography, Students, Time, Waste, Years

All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.

Embody, Important, Photographer, Photography, Pictures, Understand

You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand, that’s the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

Always Working, Condescending, Exhilarating, Time, Waste, Working

As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.

Done, Photography, Picture, Serious, Strike

It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing.

Fall, Like, Order, Photography, Same, Thinking