Elijah Gowin
Elijah Gowin’s photographs slip in through the eye, unsettle the mind, and sink into the soul. Their high, lonesome voices awaken memories of unknown experiences and unfamiliar places. The stories they tell are mythic and resonant.
Gowin draws inspiration from the South, the land of his ancestors. He did not set out to become a photographer, though his father, Emmet Gowin, is one of America’s finest. Instead, he came to it through literature—in particular, Southern literature. The stories of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty were wellsprings for his own writing. In time, however, he came to understand that images, rather than words, would be his calling.
The scenes in Gowin’s Hymnal of Dreams photographs are constructed fictions; nature provides the stage, but he arranges the details. An old woman holds a bird’s nest containing two cubic “eggs.” A shrouded bed is suspended by ropes in a woodland clearing. The surreality of these images is enhanced by the rich tones of
Gowin’s impeccable gelatin silver prints.
In his more recent series, Watering, Gowin explores the human condition through the metaphor of water. Water has the power to sustain life and destroy it, to cleanse the body and renew the spirit, to strip away the past and reveal the future—for better or for worse. Gowin’s new photographs are equally enigmatic. Are these images of immersion baptism or post-deluge rescue?
His photographic process echoes his subject matter. Through it, Gowin strips the image to its iconic essence. He begins with a manipulated digital image file printed as a small negative on inkjet paper. He cuts out this negative, scans it, and prints it (much enlarged) onto watercolor paper.2 He, alone, decides which details will remain and which will be drowned in the watery expanse.
—Jan Schall
