Emmet Gowin & Lucas Bessire in Conversation

Photographer Emmet Gowin’s first major exhibition at Pace, on view at 540 West 25th Street in New York through April 30, spotlights his aerial images of center-pivot irrigation circles on farms in the American West and Midwest. Made over the course of a decade beginning in 1987, these photographs are the subject of the new monograph The One Hundred Circle Farm, published by Princeton University Press. Gowin’s exhibition at Pace takes its title from this book.

On the occasion of Gowin’s exhibition and the release of his latest publication, the photographer spoke with Lucas Bessire, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and author of Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bessire also wrote the afterword for the monograph The One Hundred Circle Farm.

In their wide-ranging conversation, Gowin and Bessire discuss the origins of the center-pivot photographs, the formal dynamism of the images and the poetic significance of their circular subjects, and more.