Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan

Left: After Andrea Mantegna (Italian, 1431-1506), St. Christopher, ca. 1500. Red chalk. Gift of János Scholz, 1993.126 
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

Gowin photographed his niece and nephew as they caught their breath, having wrestled on the grass “long enough that they went from being mad to being reconciled.” In his own work and that of others, Gowin is drawn to visual ambiguities between tragedy and beauty, ferocity and tenderness, passion and pain—tensions vividly present, for example, in many Christian images of martyrdom.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Avebury Stone and Rennie Booher, England and Danville, Virginia, 1972. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1444/45-1510), Horses and Spectators (Fragment of an Adoration of the Kings), ca. 1500-05. Brush and brown ink or tempera, heightened with white, over traces of black chalk, on three pieces of prepared linen stitched together. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, I, 5

This photograph took shape when Gowin accidentally double-exposed a negative. He thus combined a funerary image of his wife’s grandmother, Rennie Booher, with the surface of a Neolithic monumental stone he had photographed in England a few days earlier. Examining a fragment of a painting by Botticelli, Gowin was struck by the way time has turned the linen into a complex substrate: to his eye, the figures seem to emerge from a raw block of stone. “A work of art reveals itself physically,” he emphasizes. “It isn’t [only] what the artist says it meant. It’s what you experience as it reaches into the future.”

Left: Anonymous, Close up of eye, ca. 1940s. Commercially processed gelatin silver print. Gift of Peter J. Cohen, 2015.22.3
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Ireland, 1972. Toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

In 1967, Gowin experimentally outfitted his 8x10-inch camera with a lens intended for a 4x5. The first time he saw the result, he recalled with surprise that every lens casts a round image, which a conventional camera’s design trims square before one sees it. The circular format of Gowin’s images can conjure associations with keyholes, telescopes, and the eye itself.

Among Gowin’s early inspirations were amateur photographs in the family albums of friends. He cherishes “the freshness and the blatant honesty” of snapshots, which retain their mysteries even for viewers deeply educated about art.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Scarperia, Italy, 1973. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Samuel Palmer (British, 1805-1881), The End of the Day: A Recollection of Italy, early 1870s. Watercolor, gouache, touches of gum Arabic, and traces of graphite. Purchased on the Sunny Crawford Von Bülow Fund, 1978, 2009.393

Gowin identifies with Samuel Palmer’s intense mythical vision in The End of the Day: A Recollection of Italy. The watercolor is not a record of geographic facts but a composite of observations, imagined places, and the work of artists who inspired Palmer. In 1973, as Gowin began to travel extensively, environmental concerns entered his perspective on landscape. If he wanted to portray the people he cared about, he realized, “I couldn’t think about them in an isolated way; they always had to be somewhere.”

Left: French School, Circe Changing the Men of Odysseus into Swine, late sixteenth century. Black chalk. Gift of János Scholz, 1980.73
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion, 1979. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

In 1974, Gowin salvaged this book cover from the ruins of a Virginia farmhouse. Two years later, he adorned it with a dozen stretched frog skins. The hybrid object—a marriage of organic and manmade elements—finds formal echoes in a sixteenth-century scene of transformation from The Odyssey. Odysseus’s crewmen are turning into swine after consuming drinks laced with a magical potion. They appear as grotesque hybrids, neither human nor entirely animal: “others” even unto themselves.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Urbino, Italy, 1980. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Claude Lorrain (French, 1600-1682), Landscape with Aeneas and Achates Hunting the Stag, 1669. Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white gouache, squared in graphite. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, I, 273

During his travels in the 1970s, Gowin began photographing what he called “working landscapes”: sites where humanity and nature have shaped one another over decades, centuries, or millennia.

In this mythological scene from The Aeneid Gowin sees Claude Lorrain portraying “the sacred grove, the place to which people retreated for rejuvenation or to be in touch with the sacred,” but also the forest as the artist must have known it, with “a history, darker than what you see.”

Left: Mir Kalān Khān (Indian, active ca. 1730-1775), Ibrāhīm Ibn Adham of Balkh Served by Angels, Faizabad, India, ca. 1750-75. Paper on card. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1911, MS M.458.32r
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Dark Night Chase, after William Blake and Max Ernst, 1982. Gum bichromate print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

In a series of crayon rubbings, Gowin used a toy kit designed to help children create drawings of fantastic monsters. The rubbings in this print become figures against a blue-black sky, floating above a horizon line.

In Mir Kalān Khān’s manuscript illumination of an ascetic in the wilderness, the brightly colored wings of attendant angels contrast with the moonlight tones that prevail in the scene around them. Khan's composition may be derived from portrayals of Christ being fed by angels during his forty days in the wilderness.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Tomb, Petra, Jordan, 1982. Unique gold toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Johann Sebastian Bach (German, 1685-1750), Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe, BWV 197a, 1728? Iron gall ink on paper. The Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection, gift of the Heineman Foundation, 1977, Heineman MS 10

Left: Domenico Campagnola (Italian, ca. 1500-1564), Apocalyptic Scene with Fallen Buildings, ca. 1550. Pen and brown ink. Thaw Collection
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Clear Cut, 5 Miles Southwest of Mount St. Helens, Washington, 1982 . Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

A fellowship from the Seattle Arts Commission took Gowin to Washington State a few weeks after Mount St. Helens erupted in May 1980. He revisited the area eight times in four years, photographing the evolving landscape first from an airplane and then from the ground.

One of the earliest apocalyptic landscapes in Italian art is Campagnola’s. Though he may have drawn upon his experience of a 1511 earthquake in Friuli to create this scene, it is far from an eyewitness record. His imaginative rendering includes fictional and identifiable buildings fallen to ruin.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Old Hanford City Site and the Columbia River, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, near Richland, Washington, 1986. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Lelio Orsi (Italian, 1511-1587), Apotheosis of Hercules as a Genius, ca. 1536. Pen and brown ink, over traces of black chalk. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, I, 153d

Hanford, where plutonium was processed for the Manhattan Project, became so contaminated that it needed to be scraped off the face of the earth. Gowin first saw Hanford from a plane on a return trip to Mount St. Helens. His fortuitous encounter with “the ghost of a city” prompted a decisive move into aerial work. The troubled state of the planet, he felt, called for “a new mythology.”

During a fit of madness induced by Zeus’s wife, Hera, Hercules killed his own wife and children—the tragic fate of a man with too much power for his own good.

Left: Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci (Italian, 1339-1399), Historiated Initial V with a Prophet, cut from a Gradual, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence, Italy, ca. 1392-99. Painting on vellum. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, MS M.478.17
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Edith, 1986. Toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

Gowin created this image by combining two exposures he made during the same summer: a portrait of his wife, Edith, nude in a barn window, and a study of gourds that sprouted spontaneously from the compost pile in their garden.

The unidentified prophet inside this jewel-faced letter resides simultaneously amid nature—leaves, petals, and other plant forms—and in a spiritual realm signified by gold.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Copper Ore Tailing, Globe, Arizona, 1988. Toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: William Blake (English, 1757-1827), Behemoth and Leviathan, illustration for the Book of Job, ca. 1805-10. Pen and black and gray ink, gray wash, and watercolor, over faint indications in graphite. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, 2001.77

Gowin’s aerial photographs explore the relationship between humanity, history, and the earth. The subject of this work—a mound of copper ore tailing left behind by a nineteenth-century mine—hints at the destructive side of human productivity. Gowin sees similar dualities in Blake’s art: “I like that Blake identifies evil with energy and exuberance with life, and defines our task as the reconciliation of these apparent opposites. The energy that drives us is good; and the evil—energy—that drives us is as much a part of us as the good.”

Left: Johann Hartlieb (German, active 1450), Die Kunst Chiromantia. Augsburg: Georg Schapf, ca. 1475. Blockbook, hand colored. Purchased with the Bennett Collection, 1902, PML 10
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Ground Zero and Lines of Sight for Aboveground Test, Frenchman Flat, Nevada Test Site, 1997. Toned gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

Between 1951 and 1992, the American government exploded 928 nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site. When flying over it, Gowin was both amazed and depressed by the alien landscape of sand fused into glass—testimony to the misuse of human ingenuity.

Since antiquity, diviners have studied the patterns of the human palm to foretell human fate. Die Kunst Chiromantia (The Art of Chiromancy) was the first book ever printed on palm reading.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Edith in Panama, Flight Inside, 2003. Unique gold toned salt print on Twin Rocker handmade paper. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916), The Spider, 1902. Charcoal and black chalk. Thaw Collection

Redon, whose marriage of the mundane and the enigmatic Gowin admires, created a human-animal hybrid in The Spider. An arachnid with a woman’s face grins within its web, as secure as the pupil in an eye.

In Edith in Panama, Flight Inside, 2003, two negatives are combined to represent Gowin’s wife, Edith, as a dark silhouette inhabited by the illuminated flight paths of moths.

Left: Paul Gauguin (French, 1848-1903), La Mulâtresse, ca. 1891-1903. Pen and brown ink over black chalk. Bequest of Alice Tully, 1996.54
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Edith, 2004 (Rain Droplets in a Web). Gold toned salt print on gelatin coated paper. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

On his expeditions in rain forests in Central and South America, Gowin takes small prints of his wife, as “a way of bringing Edith along, including her in the work.” After a light summer rain at home in 2004, he slipped one of these prints behind an elaborate spider web and photographed it through the beads of rain, which became a veil across her eyes.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Ecuador, 2008. Salt print on handmade paper. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Attributed to Johanna Helena Herolt (German, 1668-1723), Three Mice Nibbling Fruit, ca. 1690-1710. Watercolor on vellum. Purchased on the Fellows Fund, with the special assistance of Mrs. Carl Stern and Mrs. Lawrence Hughes, 1979.37

On a mountaintop in the mist forest in Ecuador, Gowin encountered the huge hanging leaf of an unidentified species of Philodendron silhouetted against the clouds. The holes chewed into it by feeding insects act as both a literal record of life in the forest and the self-portrait of a collective mind at work.

In precisely rendered studies of plants and insects, Herolt documented the identifying features and naturally occurring variety of her subject species. Gowin relishes Herolt’s ability to bring alive the salient traits of these flora and fauna.

Left: Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (Italian, 1682-1754), Study of Eyes, Ears, Noses and Mouths, ca. 1750. Black chalk. Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1961.12:38
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Insect Toxic Stain Index, Bolivia, November, 2010. Archival digital inkjet print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

Since 1997, Gowin has been traveling to tropical forests in Central and South America to photograph nocturnal moths. When startled or disturbed, moths release a burst of bitter chemicals. Here, Gowin created a visual index of the stains his subjects left on the old bed sheet where they land.

The disembodied features in Piazzetta’s drawing verge on the expressiveness of a whole face but are scattered loosely on the page. Together, they point toward a human subject, but, like the moth stains, they can also be appreciated individually.

Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Mariposas Nocturnas Index #44, Bolivia, 2011. Archival digital inkjet print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Simon Bening (Flemish, 1483/4-1561), Annunciation, Da Costa Hours, Ghent, Belgium, ca. 1515. Painting on vellum. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910, MS M.399, fol. 129v

Gowin has photographed and catalogued hundreds of tropical moths since he began traveling to Central and South America in the late 1990s.

The plants and animals in the border of this manuscript illumination meaningfully complement the scene. The lilies stand for purity and chastity, pink carnations for maternal love, while the butterflies—metamorphosed caterpillars—are symbols of Christ’s resurrection.

Left: Male Figure before a Goddess Drawing Aside Her Mantle, Syria, ca. 1720-1650 BC. Cylinder seal: hermatite. Acquired by Pierpont Morgan between 1885 and 1908, Morgan Seal 945
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Edith in Panama, Blakeian Conversation, 2007. Gold toned salt print on handmade paper. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin

In this print from the “Edith in Panama” series, Gowin’s wife sits in a chair, holding a larger-than-life silhouette of her head in one hand and a small tracing of herself and Emmet in the other. The “doubling” of Edith allows her to occupy multiple places and scales at once, as occurs in the narrative world of mythology.

The goddess in this ancient seal impression opens a garment to reveal her pubic area, a gesture alluding to the primal power of fertility and birth. A mortal man lifts a hand to his mouth, astonished at the truth being revealed to him.