Description
EMMET GOWIN: PHOTOGRAPHS – 1st edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf / A Light Gallery Book, 1976. Small squarish 4° in softcover. 101 pages with 68 black and white photographs, finely printed. Minor edgewear to cover else clean inside and overall a very good copy
First edition, softcover version of the rare, classic photobook with intimate portraits of Emmet’s wife, Edith, and her family, most of them taken with a 4×5 camera on a tripod, a situation in which he said “both the sitter and photographer look at each other, and what they both see and feel is part of the picture.”[9] These photos feel both posed and highly intimate at the same time, often capturing seemingly long and direct stares from his wife or her family members or appearing to intrude on a personal family moment. Gowin once said that “the coincidence of the many things that fit together to make a picture is singular. They occur only once. They never occur for you in quite the same way that they occur for someone else, so that in the tiny differences between them you can reemploy a model or strategy that someone else has used and still reproduce an original picture. Those things that do have a distinct life of their own strike me as being things coming to you out of life itself
