Emmet Govin, Nelson Gallery, UC Davis - Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
February 6 – March 14, 2003

Every picture is environmental. That is one of the overwhelmingly wonderful things about photography; no matter how much one intends to rid the picture of environment, which is to say living substance, something of it is nonetheless there. - Emmet Gowin, Interview with Philip Brookman, 2001

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs is the first major exhibition in more than ten years of work by the internationally recognized photographer. Presented at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection, the exhibition features ninety-two images created by Emmet Gowin since 1986. The artist's growing body of work bears witness to how humankind has visibly scarred and continues to alter the Earth's surface - the main theme in Emmet Gowin's series of aerial photographs.

The exhibition concentrates Emmet Gowin's rich, hand-toned black and white landscape images into a series that depict alarming views of the Earth's disturbed surface. The images appear as starkly beautiful compositions of light and form which invite long and lingering contemplation, while his subject matter raises alarm for environmental concerns.

Emmet Gowin had for many years been making portraits of his family and landscape photographs throughout the United States and Europe, as well as teaching photography at Princeton University, when, in 1980, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens moved him to charter a plane and, with a hand-held camera, made pictures of the natural devastation below. He returned there in 1986 to experience a pivotal transformation in both human and artistic terms.

In 1986 returning, I thought, for the last time to Mount Saint Helens, I took a side trip to Yakima, Washington, and a flight that changed my whole perception of the age in which I live. In less than two hours flying over the Hanford Reservation, a pattern of relationships and a dark history of places and events emerged. Still visible after forty years were the pathways, burial mounds, and waste disposal trenches, as well as skeletal remains of a city once used by over thirty thousand people who built the first reactor and enriched the first uranium. What I saw, imagined, and now know, was that a landscape had been created that could never be saved. I began in the next year to search for the other signs of our "nuclear age": missile silos, production sites, water treatment and disposal sites - in short, the realities that I had unconsciously forgotten. - Emmet Gowin, Interview with Toby Jurovics, 1996

Emmet Gowin's first photograph of this abandoned nuclear reactor site, home of the Manhattan Project, is a key image in the exhibition. Old Hanford City Site and the Columbia River; Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington are among the works in the exhibition from the 1980s that include images of mining explorations in Montana, weapons and bomb disposal sites in Utah, an alkali wash and dry watering hole in New Mexico, and an abandoned trailer park on an Apache reservation in Arizona.

In 1992, Emmet Gowin traveled in the Czech Republic for two years for aerial explorations of strip coal and chemo-petrol mines, power stations, and evidence of exploitation and devastation from the Soviet-era. Throughout the 1990's, Emmet Gowin directed his attention to photograph the American West; most frequently the Nevada Test Site and agricultural tracts using pivot irrigation in Kansas. Battlefields in Kuwait, an Israeli suburban settlement in Jerusalem, and golf courses under construction in Japan are among Emmet Gowin's global subjects.

Emmet Gowin was born in Danville, Virginia in 1941. He is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; and received an M.A. from The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Since 1973 he has been teaching photography in Princeton University's Program in Visual Art, of which he is currently the director. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974); National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1977 and 1979); The Seattle Arts Commission (1980); the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts from the State of Pennsylvania (1983) and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1993-1994). In 1997 Emmet Gowin received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. The first solo exhibition of his work was presented by The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 1983. Emmet Gowin/Photographs: The Vegetable Earth is but a Shadow retrospective exhibition was organized by The Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990 and traveled extensively. Photographs: Landscape in the Nuclear Age was presented in Japan in 1992, the same year his first European retrospective exhibition was presented in Paris.

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs was organized by The Yale University Art Gallery, and Jock Reynolds, The Henry J. Heinz II Director, and Curator of the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a handsome fully-illustrated book with essays by Jock Reynolds, author of many articles on American photography and contemporary art; nature writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams; and a revealing conversation between Emmet Gowin and Philip Brookman, senior curator of photography and media arts at The Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu