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Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth
Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth
Authors: Jock Reynolds, Philip Brookman, Terry Tempest Williams, Russell Lord
Publisher: YU Art Gallery
Category: Book

List Price: $45.00
Buy New: $28.65
You Save: $16.35 (36%)



New (17) Collectible (1) from $28.65

Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars 4 reviews
Sales Rank: 411032

Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 164
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.5
Dimensions (in): 12.9 x 10.9 x 0.4

ISBN: 0300093616
Dewey Decimal Number: 770.92
EAN: 9780300093612
ASIN: 0300093616

Publication Date: June 1, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: SHIPS from 5 locations based on your Zip Code and availability! (PA TN IN OR SC) *-* Gift Quality *-* Orders Processed Immediately! - We get your book to you Very Quickly! -L2354.14322

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Emmet Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia, and the Middle East for over twenty years. In his most compelling photographs, one witnesses how man's footprint has visually scarred and continually altered the earth's surface. This extraordinary book, published in conjunction with the first major touring exhibition of Gowin's photographs in over ten years, focuses on images created after 1986. That was the year Gowin began to extend his aerial photography explorations in America by recording images of military test sites, missile silos, ammunition storage and disposal facilities, coal mining, pivot irrigation, offroad motor traffic, and more. The book also surveys his more recent works, which focus on other regions of the world, including the battlefields of Kuwait, new golf courses in Japan, and the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic. Gowin's richly toned black-and-white images have been characterized as "immorally gorgeous," since at a distance even his most disturbing images can appear to be beautiful. In this exquisitely produced volume, Jock Reynolds provides an overview of Gowin's aerial photography and places it in the context of his earlier work and that of such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Frederick Sommer. Philip Brookman illuminates Gowin's recent work in the Czech Republic, while Terry Tempest Williams discusses Gowin's images from the American West, especially his Nevada Test Site series.


Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth   April 7, 2008
[ [ASIN: 0300093616 Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth] ]
I had seen the show of Emmet Gowin's photographs at the Corcoran and was moved by the haunting beauty of the images. After being reintroduced to the work I decided to buy the book for myself and I am glad I did. It allows me to spend more time with Gowin's images and contemplate the many layers of realization and feeling locked into the photographs. Even if we didn't know or recognize the source the work we would still be haunted by the natural and human made melancholic patterns of line, space and color of the photographs themselves.
David Carlson



5 out of 5 stars Changing The Earth   January 9, 2007
`Changing the Earth' is a collection of beautiful and compelling aerial photographs that were taken over 14 years. Where Adams has shown us the beauty of the land before man has stepped upon it, Gowin shows us what the land looks like after man has used it. Gowin is one of the best printers (photographic) in the world and quality of his work is very obvious in this book.


5 out of 5 stars Stunning beauty   April 24, 2003
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

This book despite it's somewhat horrific subject matter has a beauty so deep and profound it restores my faith and interest in Black and White image making. Beautifully printed it is a book that any budding black and white landscape photographer should own.


5 out of 5 stars Documenting Ruinous Relations With The Land   June 5, 2002
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

Like a great deal of aerial photography (Bradford Washburn's naturalistic mountain work immediately comes to mind in this connection), Emmet Gowin's meticulously detailed portfolio depicting man's ambition writ large upon the surface of our planet can often be 'read' as much as abstract art as documentary record. As art, this series of images of a wounded planet is so deceptively compelling it is easy to become lost in the sensuousness of the aesthetic moment Gowin repeatedly creates and forget that the subject matter being systematically explored is intrinsically disturbing and of concern. Indeed, the experience of finding so much beauty in landscapes of man-made desolation and ruin is unnerving. Yet it is undeniable that from a distance the patterns on the Earth made by irrigation pivots, toxic chemical ponds, missile burial trenches, mining pits, and numerous other manifestations of human 'development' without limits are endlessly unique and dramatic. Paradoxically, it is precisely this nexus of visually stimulating, geometrically intricate imagery generated in the context of wanton exploitation and destruction of the land that sustains the narrative and aesthetic power of Changing The Earth. One is absorbed in the beauty of the photography just long enough to catch sight and become painfully aware of the pervasive, intensely consequential, problem that demands attention and thought. Thus lessons for the future abound in the pages of this volume! One day our way of taking the Earth for granted by first depleting its resources for immediate gain and then dumping what is no longer wanted or useful wherever is convenient, will be seen as the opulent conceit and obscene luxury that it surely is. Until that day, studies like Changing The Earth bare witness to our collective folly, greed and irresponsibility.

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