Kisses of a Kind

There are kisses and there are kisses. That photographs can be kisses is not an obvious idea, but you could imagine a list of ways that could get long before it came to the type of kiss embodied in the life and work of Emmet Gowin, who is retiring from Princeton University after 36 years of teaching photography and is the subject of a retrospective show at the Princeton University Art Museum through February 21.

The idea that photographs can be kisses of a kind is Gowin’s. By calling attention to it I may be making more of it than he intended or intends, if he even remembers it. But it leaped out at me in a document in his own handwriting, dated May of 1967, that is displayed on the first wall one comes to when entering the show, entitled "Emmet Gowin: A Collective Portrait."

It was a statement of his philosophy of photography and its evolution from Cartier-Bresson-like pursuit of the "decisive moment" to a more holistic embrace of the particular world and people most present in the photographer’s daily life. The statement was submitted in support of his graduate thesis. In the closing paragraph he writes,

"Kisses are among the vehicles I would use if I were not able to make pictures. For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human being and another."

That’s a remarkable image. Kisses can be so many things that Gowin’s photographs are not: messy, rash, panting, teasing, needy. His pictures are, one might say, sealed with a kiss, though that suggests a sentimentality alien to his way of seeing.

In the end, the kiss of his camera is carefully planted, tender yet dry. It is a seal, a bond that never crushes or confuses, as kisses can. It is unkisslike in its great precision, its detail–and in black & white, his chosen medium, his camera is hushed and respectful, tempering with black & white’s asceticism the erotic currents that quietly course through the work. The pictures have a dreamy quality.

All these qualities are immediately evident in the continuing series of pictures of his wife and children. One of the most lyrical images of childhood I’ve ever seen is Elijah and Donna Jo, Danville, Virginia, 1971 © Emmet and Edith Gowin (top picture). Within the stasis of a square format, the two children play with looping lengths of a single garden hose on the backyard grass.

Gowin may have moved beyond the decisive moment in his own mind, but here he has caught an especially sensuous one exactly. Elijah holds up a loop of hose as if facilitating it for his sister, who, a few yards away, as the hose describes roller coaster curves, lifts the nozzle to her lips and drinks lustily, with head thrown back. It’s as perfect as a dream, and Donna Jo’s body language, holding the arching hose above her head with lifted arms makes me think of Wagner’s adolescent hero, Siegfried, sounding his clarion horn in the enchanted forest of the Ring.

Shifting from the intimacy of the family pictures, which are all studies of the dynamism of the body, Gowin’s aerial photos at first seem a world apart. How does one kiss the ground from an airplane? (The reverse of Jimi Hendrix singing, "’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.")

Pictures like Pivot Agriculture in the Snake River Plain, Washington, 1991,© Emmet and Edith Gowin (middle picture), becomes studies of the body language of the earth. Or not just the earth on its own but man’s indelible inscriptions on it, a tattoistry of canals, roads, ditches, and so on. The aerial pictures record a lover’s fascination with the skin of his beloved, and yet there is a restraint, a dryness to them, an investigative concern. We are a long way from the plush fleshy folds of Grant Wood’s elevated landscapes.

Another beautiful moment, tenderly framed in the opening of a tent, is Edith and Elijah, Danville, Virginia, 1971. © Emmet and Edith Gowin (bottom picture). Even in this low-res digital file you can see the amount of shadow detail in the image, the lushness of the middle tones. The sensousness of Gowin’s images come as much from the mastery of black & white exposure and printmaking as from the subject matter itself.

The show is called "A Collective Portrait" because it includes work not only by Gowin but by his famous teachers Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer and by a number of Gowin’s talented former students, some of them now full-time artists. I’ll talk about this aspect of the show in a later post.

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