Elijah Gowin in Conversation with Emmet Gowin & Edith Morris @ PhotoAlliance
PhotoAlliance is proud to present a compelling lecture featuring artists Elijah Gowin in conversation with his parents Edith and Emmet Gowin. This evening of discussion will highlight each artist’s innovative approaches to contemporary photography and its larger role in visual culture. The artists will present an overview of the past, present, and upcoming work, as well as field questions from the audience at the end. So please join us for what is sure to be an inspiring and thought-provoking evening!
Elijah Gowin uses photography to speak about ritual, landscape and memory. He received his BA in Art History from Davidson College and MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. His photographs are in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, among others. His awards include the John S. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 as well as grants from the Charlotte Street Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. He founded Tin Roof Press to publish his books on art and photography including “The Last Firefly” in 2024 and "Of Falling and Floating" in 2011. Presently, he is a Professor in the Department of Media, Art and Design at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where he directs photographic studies. Gowin is represented by the Robert Mann Gallery, New York, Photo Gallery International, Tokyo and Bond Millen Gallery, Richmond, Virginia.
In his book The Last Firefly, Gowin uses the disappearing and threatened firefly as a way to explore ecology and our changing landscape, and highlights how the firefly might provide a warning of our tenuous human future. Gowin traveled to photograph fireflies and the surrounding environments in Virginia, Malaysia and Thailand, using photography to show the visual beauty of fireflies and the darkness they inhabit. The project also highlights the impact of deforestation, light pollution, and over-tourism that globalization has brought on in the 21st century.
Emmet Gowin’s photographic career spans six decades, in which he has moved from the intimate to the grand scale of humankind’s impact on nature. Early on, his photographs centered on his wife Edith Morris and their Virginia family, later focusing on aerial vistas of nuclear test sites and scientific surveys of tropical ecosystems and their biodiversity. He has created formally abstract, luminous compositions depicting the volcanic devastation of Washington’s Mount St. Helens; the chemical contamination of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington; pivot irrigation agriculture in Kansas; the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic; and most recently, the Spanish province of Granada.
Gowin’s new book Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994, is a body of intimate portraits by Gowin of his wife Edith Morris and her extended family taken in Danville, Virginia. Titled after the street where many of Edith’s family members lived, the series explores the lives and relationships of a family through time.
Gowin unearthed the photographs on view in the book—most of which have never been published and were printed for the first time in 2020–2022—from his archive, looking back at and revisiting a subject that drew his attention during different stages of his life. “I never lost interest in the gestures or the faces of this dearest of families,” he writes in a statement on Baldwin Street. “It was here that I came of age and found my first true subject.”
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, Providence, in 1967. He served on the faculty of Princeton University, New Jersey, as a professor of photography in the Visual Arts Program from 1973 until his retirement in 2009. Gowin is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1977, 1979), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1994), the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University (1997), and the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, Princeton University (2006). In 2024, the Princeton University Art Museum acquired the artist’s archive, which spans six decades of artmaking and will continue to grow as his career continues. Gowin’s work is held in important public collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, among many others.