Aerial spy: documenting the myriad ways in which human industry has ravaged the landscape, Emmet Gowin's photographs display a toxic beauty in which we are all complicit - Photography

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Ken Johnson

During the past 15 years, Emmet Gowin has pursued a global reconnaissance mission to uncover crimes against nature perpetrated by the world's military-industrial complex. From bomb disposal sites in the Nevada desert to strip-mines in the Czech Republic, Gowin has catalogued a dismal record of human carelessness, greed and destructiveness. Last April, the Yale University Art Gallery opened an exhibition of 92 of these haunting, appalling yet mysteriously beautiful pictures. Titled "Changing the Earth," it is a visually captivating show, but it also raises complicated questions about the relationship between art, reportage and activism.

Gowin started out as a very different kind of artist. Emerging in 1967 with an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with Harry Callahan, he focused on his family and the rural environment of his home in Danville, Va., producing pictures of gritty, sometimes surrealistic sensuousness and, in the many portraits of his wife, Edith, intensely candid, not always conventionally pretty eroticism. Gowin, who was born in Danville in 1941, has taught photography at Princeton University since 1973.

In the 1970s, Gowin began to draw back from the narrowly personal perspective of his early work to take in greater expanses of landscape. Traveling around the U.S. as well as overseas, he produced breathtaking views of natural wildernesses and ancient cities. A trip in 1980 took him to the state of Washington, where he flew over and photographed the devastation caused by the recent eruption of Mount St. Helens. Returning to Washington six years later, he took a side trip over a less well-known place: Hanford Reservation, a now-abandoned town where, under the aegis of the Manhattan Project, the first nuclear reactor was developed. It was this flight that launched Gowin on his global espionage project.

The effect of Gowin's aerial pictures is more complicated than you might expect of a primarily forensic enterprise. Rather than matter-of-factly documentary, they are seductive, romantically thrilling and sad. One observer quoted in the show's catalogue called them "immorally beautiful" (p. 144), a phrase that neatly captures their ambiguous allure. Without titles or other background information, you could easily take them as essays in the esthetics of modernist landscape, wherein what matters are the textures, contours, light and shadows of the ground; the taut, flat, semi-abstract compositions; and the manipulation of light, color and focus to generate moody, poetic atmospheres. Many of the pictures have an otherworldly quality. All are in black and white, augmented by hand-toning that ranges from icy metallic gray to dull smoky red. Many suggest views of other planets seen from a spaceship in an unusually somber science-fiction movie. Circular fields produced by rotating irrigation machinery look like landing platforms for flying saucers. The cratered fields at bomb test sites resemble lunar landscapes.

At the same time, Gowin's pictures have an antique appearance--due in part to the hand-toning but also to the subject matter. As curator Jock Reynolds, the Yale Art Gallery's director, points out in his informative catalogue essay, the sublime, highly detailed expanses of the American West call to mind 19th-century photographers like William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan and Carlton Watkins.

The laconic, matter-of-fact titles bring us down to earth: Erosion in the Side of a Silver Ore Tailing near Bayard, Grant County, New Mexico; The Abandoned and Condemned Village of Times Beach, Missouri; Effluent Holding Pond, Cheopetro Mines, Bohemia, Czech Republic. These photos are not just formal exercises, the titles tell us; they depict real places, where real and terrible things have happened and continue to happen. The titles add a curious excitement. The implication that some immense, actual evil accounts for or underlies the visual facts with which we are presented arouses an almost prurient interest. This is the stuff of environmentalist porn.

At the same time, though, unless you bring to Gowin's pictures considerable ecological knowledge, you may remain uncertain about what exactly they are meant to communicate. What, for example, is the problem with pivot agriculture, in which long rotating spokes produce well-watered crops in circular patterns? Dusted with Kansas snow, they look decidedly benign. In the catalogue interview with Corcoran photography curator Philip Brookman, Gowin explains that although this technology facilitates production of food in otherwise non-arable places, it also depletes underlying aquifers. "[A] cluster of twenty circles of pivot agriculture, pumping away in the August heat, uses as much water as a city of two million people," he notes (p. 157). He doesn't say what alternatives, if any, might be available.

To get the full impact of Gowin's work, it is helpful to read the passionately eloquent catalogue essay by environmentalist and nature writer Terry Tempest Williams. Flying over the West Desert in Utah, she and Gowin come to the government-restricted area of "Dugway, home to anthrax production, the testing of bombs, and the storage of munitions."