Text by Photo Alliance:
Born in Danville, Virginia, in 1941, Emmet Gowin taught in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton for thirty-six years. He received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1967. While at RISD, he studied under Harry Callahan, one of his principal mentors and greatest influences. Gowin is a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974); two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1977 and 1979); a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for 1993–94; the 1983 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the State of Pennsylvania; the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in 1997; and the Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 2006.
His work has been widely exhibited in the United States and abroad, including solo shows and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Espace Photographique, Paris; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; and the Princeton University Art Museum, where a solo exhibition was previously mounted in 1998. Gowin’s photographs are held in museum collections worldwide. His work is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York.
