ART REVIEW : In Living Black and White : Mid-Career Retrospective of Gowin Photos at LACMA

In genre scenes of rural family life and in sublime landscapes often located at the edge of civilization, Emmet Gowin photographs a post-paradise world of human frailty and the mortality of the flesh. In this, he may be the last of a traditional, widely venerated breed.

The mid-career retrospective of Gowin’s work, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and recently opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, assembles more than 120 of his lushly printed, black-and-white photographs, which span nearly 25 years. Gowin typically works in series--family portraits, landscapes of rural Italy, aerial photographs of farming country and mining sites--and a quick comparison between an early photograph and a more recent one gives evidence of both the continuity and the alteration in his art.

“Edith, Chincoteague, Virginia” (1967) shows a three-quarter view of the back of a woman’s head. Her hair is pulled back, swept up and held in place by a barrette. She wears a knit sweater over a T-shirt, and her shoulders are slightly splayed, as if she’s leaning on her elbows below the picture’s framing edge, or has her hands clasped behind her back.

Edith, who is Gowin’s wife and most often repeated photographic subject during the past quarter century, is pictured with a casual intimacy. On dyed paper that softens the whites, the gelatin-silver print yields warm tones that imbue the image with an unmistakable tenderness. The camera viewpoint is behind and just above her, looking down, so that her head and shoulders are framed by a silvery-gray, reflective field. On closer examination, the field appears to be a big puddle of water on the muddy ground. Clouds hang in the reflection, bringing Earth, air and water together as a halo for this visually caressed “Everywoman.”

From this intimate image of Edith suffused in the landscape to a picture titled “Aeration Pond, Toxic Water Treatment Facility, Pine Bluff, Arkansas” (1989) would seem a very great distance, and in many obvious respects it is. There’s nothing especially tender about toxic waste, and people are nowhere visible from this airplane view of the land. Still, Gowin’s steady hand is shown in the exquisite attention to craftsmanship and technique (which owes much to his friendship with photographer Frederick Sommer), the Modernist flattening of the image to enhance its sense of two-dimensional abstraction, the almost atavistic attachment to black-and-white during an era awash in color pictures, the Romantic ethos of the sublime and radiant landscape, and more.

In this aerial landscape vista it’s as if the camera’s viewpoint on Edith had been pulled back--way back, to encompass a macrocosm. The glowing rows of irregularly shaped, interlocking, amoeba-like pools of water in the aeration pond also suggest a cellular microcosm, as if the landscape was a living body being peered at through a microscope. With great subtlety, the surface of the Earth and the surface of the photograph are visually transformed into a kind of skin. As in the portrait of Edith, a poetic intimacy crowds the picture.

The 51-year-old artist is at his best with pictures that take this ambitious leap, fusing nature and culture in an evocative dialogue and a philosophically heady dance. Among the most arresting images in the show is a 1980 cityscape of “Matera, Italy,” in which the streets, buildings and retaining walls are miraculously merged with the rocky hillside into which the ancient town was built. The densely packed hillside is crowned by a single tower that protrudes into a flat, off-white sky--a man-made pinnacle from which to see the landscape.

*

“Matera, Italy” anticipates by several years a beautiful series of photographs of ancient temples and dwellings carved into the mountains of Petra, Jordan. They ritualize desire for dwelling in the Earth.

Images of man-made ruins slowly collapsing back into geological cycles of time, these pictures have been provocatively installed in the museum’s galleries next to a remarkable series of pictures of the aftermath of the explosive eruption of Mount St. Helens, Washington. Valleys and ridges are swamped with ash, shattered trees stand like broken columns in ruined temples, whole forests are leveled like spilled boxes of matchsticks. Gowin’s images are the other side of the coin of Carleton Watkins’ great 19th-Century pictures of the West, in which the camera constructed the raw landscape as an equivalent to the classical splendor of ancient Greece. Invoking history, Watkins looked forward in time to an idealized future, while Gowin looked back at a cyclical inevitability.

The least appealing pictures in the show are those which sentimentalize nature, often through the use of double-exposure. A death-portrait of Edith’s grandmother, Rennie Booher, laid out in her casket, is merged with a close-up image of an ancient British burial stone; apparently a surprising, accidental double-exposure (Gowin had just returned from photographing in England when the matriarch died, and he inadvertently loaded an exposed sheet of film into his camera), the image that resulted nonetheless seems mawkish. And, in a manner reminiscent of art-school amateurs, the cliche of the fecund Earth Mother that emerges from two double-exposures of a naked Edith entwined and overlaid with vines and tubers is simply too much to bear.

These double-exposures speak most clearly of Gowin’s teacher, Harry Callahan, with whom he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. According to the fine exhibition catalogue by Philadelphia Museum curator Martha Chahroudi, it was in Callahan’s art that Gowin discovered his own predilection for uncovering “a secret, unrecognized dimension of the commonplace.” It’s a photographic tradition that was dominant when Gowin began to make pictures in the early 1960s, but that has been largely eclipsed by Conceptually influenced photography since the ‘70s. In a way, Gowin stands betwixt and between an older generation of Modernists and those legions of younger post-Conceptualists.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Oct. 11. Closed Mondays.