Article
Newsletter: Winter 1998
Gowin, professor of the Council of the Humanities and Visual Arts, Princeton University... made a series of aerial photographs surveying the landscape beyond the Missouri River, creating a reconnaissance of the post-war West. A significant departure from his well-known portraits of his wife and family, these images were first inspired by a 1986 flight over the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, the facility that refined plutonium for the nuclear weapons program: What I saw, imagined, and now know, was that a landscape had been created that could never be saved . I began in the next year to search for other signs of our "nuclear age": the missile silos, production sites, waste treatment and disposal sites-in short, the realities which I had unconsciously forgotten.
While these photographs document massive changes to the earth and environment, they also are sensitive to the slower but more deliberate actions of the natural world. Using a sophisticated printing process that separates multiple tones across the surface of the image, Gowin's prints reveal both specific places and the anatomy of the natural world in an almost topographic fashion. Although often confronting sites of tremen dous devastation, Gowin's photographs rely on visual eloquence and abstraction to address the complexities of the landscape we have created. The artist has frequently referred to these images as "Late Twentieth-century Landscapes," a phrase that suggests an awareness of history as it unfolds and a consciousness of the effects of our actions.
While these photographs document massive changes to the earth and environment, they also are sensitive to the slower but more deliberate actions of the natural world. Using a sophisticated printing process that separates multiple tones across the surface of the image, Gowin's prints reveal both specific places and the anatomy of the natural world in an almost topographic fashion. Although often confronting sites of tremen dous devastation, Gowin's photographs rely on visual eloquence and abstraction to address the complexities of the landscape we have created. The artist has frequently referred to these images as "Late Twentieth-century Landscapes," a phrase that suggests an awareness of history as it unfolds and a consciousness of the effects of our actions.
