Photography 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 GowinI want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."
Emmet GowinYouโre 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 GowinAs a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.
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