Photographer Emmet Gowin To Give Vassar Talk

Photographer Emmet Gowin To Give Vassar Talk
At 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, September 16, 2003, noted photographer Emmet Gowin will talk about his work at Taylor Hall on the Vassar College campus. Twenty-five of his aerial photographs are currently on exhibit at the college's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Gowin began photographing from the air in the 1980s, when he documented the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. Since then, he has worked as far afield as the Czech Republic, postwar Kuwait, and Israel. Even the most alarming of Gowin's images of nuclear facilities, vast irrigation systems, mines, and battlefields are starkly beautiful compositions of light and form.

"Aesthetically and intellectually, Emmet Gowin is very wide-ranging in the associations he makes. His work ties together many careers, traditions and perspectives," said Joel Smith, photography curator at the Art Center, who organized the current exhibitions Histories of Photography and Emmet Gowin: Aerial Landscapes. "His photographs reveal the earth's surface as an index of human activity, from the makeshift 'nature' of a Japanese golf course to the lunar dystopia of Nevada bomb-testing sites."

Gowin's photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He has been teaching photography at Princeton University since 1973, and recently served as director of its Program in Visual Arts.

In 2002, the Yale University Art Gallery organized the major exhibition Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth, with 92 of Gowin's aerial photographs. On view this fall at the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson), the exhibition will continue on to venues in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington before closing at Harvard University.

Emmet Gowin's September 16 talk, "Changing the Earth," is co-sponsored by the Vassar College Department of Art/Agnes Rindge Claflin Fund, the Environmental Studies Program, the American Culture Program, the Department of Geography and Geology, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty. A reception will immediately follow at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, which is adjacent to Taylor Hall.

The exhibitions Histories of Photography and Emmett Gowin: Aerial Landscapes will remain on display at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center through Wednesday September 24, 2003. Admission is free and open to the public, Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. and Sunday from 1:00 - 5:00 p.m. The Art Center is wheelchair accessible. For more information, call (845) 437-5632 or visit fllac.vassar.edu.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations or information on accessibility should contact Campus Activities Office at (845) 437-5370. Without sufficient notice, appropriate space and/or assistance may not be available.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2003.