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Emmet Gowin

In Focus

Mar 23 – Apr 30, 2022

For six decades, photographer Emmet Gowin has explored humanity’s relationship to the natural world. A key figure in the history of the medium, Gowin’s environmentally engaged works meditate on transformations of the Earth’s surface and can be understood as prophetic visions of the consequences of humanity’s persistent exploitation of the environment.

This digital presentation, coinciding with Gowin’s exhibition The One Hundred Circle Farm in New York, spotlights the artist’s aerial images of center-pivot irrigation circles on farms in the American West and Midwest. These works, photographed by Gowin from a bird’s eye view of a small aircraft, examine timely questions of sustainability, agricultural practices, and water use through a visual language that often borders on abstraction.

Circular and linear formations lend these images an otherworldly quality that belies their true gravity. Portraits of an ongoing and escalating environmental crisis, Gowin’s center-pivot works depict industrial, geological, and climatic mark-making on the Earth. As the artist writes of these images in the introduction to The One Hundred Circle Farm, published by Princeton University Press, “This survey, although undertaken in episodes, was ten years in the making, then on hold for another twenty years. I still loved the images themselves even as I began to realize where reality was headed. Beauty can also be the agent of difficult and unwanted news. Our lives are not long, and our influence is small. It remains to be shown whether beauty can also be an agent of understanding or of change."

Emmet Gowin, One Section Comprising Four 120-Acre Center-Pivot Circles near Garden City, Kansas, 1995, pigment on paper, 15-1/4" × 15-3/8" (38.7 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper

Almost immediately, I felt that taking in the form of the Circle was as deeply human and profoundly attractive as worshipping the sun or the moon must have been for the peoples of prehistory.

Emmet Gowin
Emmet Gowin, Cloud Front and Center-Pivot Irrigation Circles near the Columbia River, Benton County, Washington, 1991, pigment on paper, 15-3/8" × 15-3/8" (39.1 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper 25-1/8" × 22-1/4" × 1-5/8" (63.8 cm × 56.5 cm × 4.1 cm)
Emmet Gowin, Pivot Irrigation Agriculture with Harvest Pattern near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Franklin County, Washington, 1987, pigment on paper, 14-5/8" × 15" (37.1 cm × 38.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper

Emmet Gowin’s genius lies in how he bears witness. Our challenge is how to see between the lines. That is where the prayer might be found.

Lucas Bessire
Emmet Gowin, Marginal Field, Scablands Glacial Area South of Moses Lake, Washington, 1991, pigment on paper, 15-1/8" × 15-3/8" (38.4 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper
Emmet Gowin, Hay Field Complex near the Columbia River, Benton County, Washington, 1991, pigment on paper, 15-1/2" × 15-3/8" (39.4 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper

The circles are the footprints of industrial irrigation; the center pivots are icons of American agribusiness; the lines inscribe the founding frontier mythologies of this country. Never have these surfaces been portrayed with such delicacy and force.

Lucas Bessire
Emmet Gowin, The Clockwise Sweep of the Watering Arm, Center-Pivot Irrigation, San Luis Valley, Colorado, 1993, pigment on paper, 15" × 15-3/8" (38.1 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper
Emmet Gowin, Rows of Raked Hay Showing the Disruption of a Thunderstorm, Snake River Plain near the Confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, Washington, 1991, pigment on paper, 15-1/8" × 15-3/8" (38.4 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper
Emmet Gowin, Rows of Mown Hay, Center-Pivot Irrigation Circle, Benton County, Washington, 1991, pigment on paper, 15" × 15" (38.1 cm × 38.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper
Emmet Gowin, Large Circle Complex near the Columbia River, Lincoln County, Washington, 1991, pigment on paper, 15-1/2" × 15-3/8" (39.4 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper

The sheer amount of work that goes into a circle is hard to believe unless you have done it. Each is a long-running choreography of hands-on metal, metal on earth. Machines driven and maintained, crops planned and processed, bodies exhausted and recovering, ground worked and then worked again.

Lucas Bessire
Emmet Gowin, Overlapping Circles in Winter near Garden City, Kansas, 1995, pigment on paper, 15-1/4" × 15-3/8" (38.7 cm × 39.1 cm), image 22" × 17" (55.9 cm × 43.2 cm), paper

To inquire about available works by Emmet Gowin, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

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  • Past, Emmet Gowin, In Focus, Mar 23, 2022