CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/25/2013

Best of 2013: Emmet Gowin

Featured image, "Edith, Chincoteague Island, Virginia" (1967), is reproduced from Aperture's long-awaited four-decade survey of Emmet Gowin, named one of TIME magazine's Best Photobooks of 2013. Gowin wrote, in 1976 and 2001, "'Through my marriage to Edith Morris, in 1964, I entered a family freshly different from my own. 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. My attention was a natural duty, which could honor that love…' These words, written more than thirty-five years ago, continue to embody an ideal that I do not wish to outlive. Although all creative work requires an encounter with the unknown, and a visitation to places we do not yet understand, making the images of Edith continues to be the central thread and redeeming experience within my life. It is, in large measure, the central poem within my work. These pictures are how I feel about the world."