Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Hardcover

Jock Reynolds; Philip Brookman; Terry Tempest Williams; Russell Lord

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300093616 ISBN 13: 9780300093612

Publisher: Yale University Art Gallery, 2002

Synopsis

Emmet Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia, and the Middle East for over twenty years. In his most compelling photographs, one witnesses how man’s footprint has visually scarred and continually altered the earth’s surface. This extraordinary book, published in conjunction with the first major touring exhibition of Gowin’s photographs in over ten years, focuses on images created after 1986. That was the year Gowin began to extend his aerial photography explorations in America by recording images of military test sites, missile silos, ammunition storage and disposal facilities, coal mining, pivot irrigation, offroad motor traffic, and more. The book also surveys his more recent works, which focus on other regions of the world, including the battlefields of Kuwait, new golf courses in Japan, and the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic. Gowin’s richly toned black-and-white images have been characterized as “immorally gorgeous,” since at a distance even his most disturbing images can appear to be beautiful.

In this exquisitely produced volume, Jock Reynolds provides an overview of Gowin’s aerial photography and places it in the context of his earlier work and that of such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Frederick Sommer. Philip Brookman illuminates Gowin’s recent work in the Czech Republic, while Terry Tempest Williams discusses Gowin’s images from the American West, especially his Nevada Test Site series.

About this title

From the Publisher:

This book is the catalogue for an exhibition on view at the Yale University Art Gallery from April 23 to July 30, 2002. The exhibition will then travel to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and other venues to be announced. Published in association with the Yale University Art Gallery.

About the Author:

Jock Reynolds is the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery and has published extensively on American photography and contemporary art. Philip Brookman is curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Terry Tempest Williams is a nature writer and environmental activist residing in Utah.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Art Gallery
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0300093616
• ISBN 13: 9780300093612
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 164