Emmet Gowin received a BFA in Graphic Design from the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in 1965 and an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967.
Read MoreHe served on the faculty of Princeton University as a professor of photography in the Visual Arts Program from 1973 until his retirement in 2009, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974) and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1977, 1979).
For six decades, Gowin has contemplated humanity's relationship to the natural world with visual wonderment. His photographs have evolved from intimate portraits of his wife Edith Morris and extended Virginia family, to aerial vistas of nuclear test sites, to scientific surveys of tropical ecosystems and their dependent biodiversity. He has created formally abstract, luminous compositions of the volcanic devastation of Washington’s Mount St. Helens, the chemical contamination of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, pivot irrigation agriculture in Kansas, the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic, and most recently, the Spanish province of Granada.
Text courtesy Pace Gallery.
