Emmet Gowin’s American Family
The photographer Emmet Gowin has travelled the world to make extraordinary aerial views of landscapes ravaged by man and nature, but his most well-known and influential photographs were made closer to home. Some of the earliest of these images, many previously unprinted and retrieved from his files during the pandemic, are included in his new book, “Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966-1994,” named for the dead-end road in Danville, Virginia, where his wife, Edith Morris, lived when they first started seeing each other. Gowin was born in Danville, in 1941, just a mile away, but by the time he and Edith met, in 1960, he was living in another part of town, where his father was the minister of a Methodist church. They married in 1964, and their extended family—farmers, mill workers, housewives, clergy, many of them living in houses nearby—became what he called “my first true subject.”
“Baldwin Street” opens with a statement from Gowin noting, of Edith’s extended clan, “I admired their simplicity and generosity and thought of the pictures I made as agreements. I wanted to pay attention to the body and personality that had agreed out of love to reveal itself.” Many of the black-and-white photographs that follow are as casual as snapshots, but they’re far from simple documents. They’re often posed, without feeling formal. Children dart into the frame. A sitter’s attention skitters off. A group disbands. Gowin isn’t in any of these pictures, but his presence—loving, amused, amazed—defines them, giving the work a lovely intensity, a glow. You sense that, in the moment, there was nowhere else Gowin wanted to be than on this lawn, in this kitchen, with these people. And what a pleasure it is to be there, too.
Gowin is present as a commentator throughout the book. The longest text appears opposite a portrait of his father, whom he refers to, with striking formality, as Pastor Gowin—a tall, white-haired man with glasses, a tie, and suspenders, holding a bucket that he used for collecting figs. “That’s probably in his last year or two,” Gowin notes. “Mother had just died. It totally humanized him, in the most beautiful way. It pulled the rug from under him, too, when he did not have her stability and her moral clarity.” With his comments, and one from Edith (Gowin’s mother “was a much more gentle person, a much more spiritual person”), the photo becomes a portrait of a marriage.
But the marriage that remains at the heart of “Baldwin Street” is the one between Emmet and Edith, whom he refers to as “my guide and informant in all things.” Here, in the first decades of their marriage, every new portrait feels like an offering, a tribute. She’s naked in only one of the photographs in the new book—topless, in a pair of grandmotherly underpants—but her frank nudity would later become one of Gowin’s key subjects, a slippage between public and private that gave his work an edge of Southern eccentricity—not gothic, not Faulknerian or in the high-strung Carson McCullers mode, but with all the familial push-and-pull of an Anne Tyler novel.
Yet there’s very little drama in Gowin’s pictures, and any plot is sketchy or buried. The elders here are generally all of a piece—stoic, patient, dressed as simply and modestly as possible. Four sisters, Fannie, Bernice, Gertrude, and Edith’s mother, Reva, pose in loosely fitted housedresses that they made themselves from pretty printed gingham fabric that they wove in the cotton mill. It’s a fashion photograph with no designer labels. Not surprisingly, the children in Gowin’s pictures are the ones who set off the sparks. One of them, Amy, a blond child with limp ponytails and a thin dress that looks like it might have been stained, stands outside a porch door, her fists balled up, mouth open, angry or unhappy or both. Another girl, Donna Jo, apparently naked on a back-yard lawn, holds several small, round pieces of fruit, still on their leafy branch, clasped to her chest like a trophy. Gowin notes, “It is just the incarnation of Eve with apples.” It’s one of the most remarkable images in the book, and one, among many, that makes us aware of Gowin’s influence on Sally Mann.
On their own, the pictures in “Baldwin Street” remind us of the pleasure of looking and the rewards of being alive to the world. But again and again Gowin’s words, at once spontaneous and sincere, let us tap into the vivid spirit behind his camera’s canny eye. One brief caption, opposite an image of Edith and four children playing “crack the whip” on a summer lawn, sums it up: “On days when things were happening, I might be taking seven, eight rolls of film in one huge deluge of wanting to see.”
