EMMET GOWIN

The exhibition will spotlight a selection from Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994, a body of intimate portraits by Gowin of his wife Edith Morris and her extended family taken in Danville, Virginia. Named after the dead-end street where many of Edith’s family members—including her mother, Reva Booher Morris—lived, the series bears witness to the lives and relationships that shaped this family over time and sheds light on Gowin’s artistic development across his career, which spans more than six decades.

Gowin unearthed the photographs on view in the show—most of which have never been published and were printed for the first time in 2020–2022—from his archive, looking back at and revisiting a subject that drew his attention during different stages of his life. “I never lost interest in the gestures or the faces of this dearest of families,” he writes in a statement on Baldwin Street. “It was here that I came of age and found my first true subject.”

Through Gowin’s lens, images of Edith in her bedroom or on a ladder in the yard, of Reva and her sisters, children playing, family lounging outside, and funeral onlookers, are captured with tangible care and compassion, reflecting the artist’s close relationships with these subjects. “Through Edith and her family, Baldwin Street became the center of my spiritual universe,” he writes. “For over fifty years, those houses and yards, along with Reva’s garden on Baldwin Street, all the children, the aunts and uncles, that small but intensely vivid and inspiring world, was in my mind the true center of the world.”

Gowin’s work—which will be the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts—is held in numerous public collections worldwide including The Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 2024, the Princeton University Art Museum acquired the artist’s archive, which will continue to grow as he produces new work.