World-famous photographer, fine artist, and Princeton University Professor Emeritus Emmet Gowin of Bucks County has committed his archive to Princeton University Art Museum.
The collection includes thousands of objects that detail the full breadth of Gowin’s celebrated career as an artist and teacher.
The Emmet Gowin Archive is the latest addition to the museum’s holdings of artist archives, already notably strong in the area of photography. Gowin’s archive joins those of the notable photographers Clarence H. White, Ruth Bernhard, and Minor White.
Made possible by the “extraordinary generosity” of Emmet Gowin and his wife Edith—who has been Emmet’s muse, partner, and spouse for 60 years—the Gowin archive spans six decades and holds thousands of objects, the museum said.
They include: more than 650 signed, finished photographs; approximately 500 unsigned test prints; approximately 7,000 rolls of film; approximately 7,000 contact sheets; approximately three handmade photographic albums; approximately three book maquettes, including photographic prints; additional photographic and biographical materials; and more than 50 photographs by other artists, including Sally Mann, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Walker Evans, among others.
“I have long felt that Emmet is one of the essential photographers of our time,” said museum director James Steward. “Since coming to Princeton it has been a personal passion that Emmet’s archive—the full record of his artistic life—should come to Princeton, where he taught with such impact for so many years. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Emmet and Edith for making this happen.”
Altogether, the archive—which will continue to grow as Gowin, a longtime Newtown resident, produces new works—amounts to the largest and most definitive group of photographs and records by the artist, who joined the faculty of Princeton University’s Visual Arts Program in 1973, teaching regularly from the museum’s extensive photographic holdings.
Gowin, who was born in Danville, Va., in 1941, would teach at Princeton for 36 years until his retirement in 2009. The museum marked that occasion with the exhibition “Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait,” featuring the work of some of Gowin’s former students who have gone on to remarkable careers in photography, including Andrew Moore, Fazal Sheikh, David Maisel, Laura McPhee, Accra Shepp, and Carla Williams.
Gowin’s earliest mature works, from the early 1960s, are depictions of his wife, Edith Morris Gowin, whom he married in 1964. Photographing her in black and white, Gowin returned to his partner—and later, their children—as a subject throughout his career, often with an intimacy that flouted the standards of the time.
After the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens in Washington State, Gowin turned his attention to aerial photography, examining the surface of the Earth through series that captured at once the objective facts of landscape formations and the emotional power they wield over viewers. Later works have explored nuclear test sites, tropical ecosystems, and the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic and the agricultural landscape of Granada.
The Gowins assembled the archive for the purpose of creating a comprehensive representation of Emmet Gowin’s life’s work as an artist and teacher. The archive will serve as a resource for future teaching, research, publications, and exhibitions.
Gathered from the personal and professional collections of Emmet and Edith Gowin, the photographs and other materials include highlights such as:
·The complete works from his series “Nevada Test Site” and “The One Hundred Circle Farm”
·Unique and exceptional salt prints by the artist on handmade paper; and
·Every photograph featured in Gowin’s retrospective held at the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid in 2013.
The archive becomes a fundamental element of the art museum’s “campaign for art,” an ongoing effort to secure gifts and promised gifts of works of art on the occasion of its groundbreaking new facility, scheduled to open in 2025. Highlights of that effort will be on view in one of the inaugural exhibitions that will launch the new facility.
“Getting to know Emmet and his equally amazing wife Edith has truly been one of the great joys of my decade at the museum,” said Bunnell Curator of Photography Katherine A. Bussard. “Working with them both to bring the Gowin archive to Princeton is one of my deepest honors, ensuring that this legendary photographer’s work—from the personal picture to the ecological document, from the minuscule details of a moth to the aerial markings of the landscape—will continue to be appreciated for decades to come.”
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