Youโre always working at the margin of what you donโt understand, thatโs the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.
Emmet GowinPhotography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isnโt attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you donโt see.
Emmet GowinTwentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'
Emmet GowinI want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."
Emmet GowinWhat's great is that the picture is already taken before it goes public. It's in secret. The trust that develops from such a habit engenders risk, and you realise you're not as vulnerable as you thought. Once you become comfortable with being more truthful about who you are, the easier it is, the prouder you become. That's the way it unfolded for us.
Emmet GowinIt might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we're quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that's useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can't know exactly what it is we are doing.
Emmet Gowin