Art Matters by Emmet Gowin

All things change when we do.

The first word Ahh . . . Blossoms into all others,

Each of them is true.

— Kukai

For many of us, the experience of seeing a certain work of art changes our lives. I was fifteen and still in high school when I saw Ansel Adams’s photograph Sierra Nevada (1938). That moment changed my life. Until then a photograph—this was of young grasses sprouting at the base of a tree charred by fire—was only a factual recording. A photograph was only the light reflected from the surface of real things. Until then I did not think of a photograph as potentially transcendent, or a work of real art. 

That Ansel Adams photograph changed photography for me. At home that night, I asked to borrow the family camera, a Zeiss Ikon, which my father treasured, and which, as he put it, was only on loan. Still, I managed to find my own fire-blackened tree trunk with young grasses and made my own version. The Adams photograph was now both familiar and, at the same time, the manifestation of something I considered invisible: an almost biblical resurrection, and yet part of our ordinary lives, with a deep psychological and visual power. It was an experience that never let go of me. I began to think, images really are about images; one image gives rise to another. That, I realized, is exactly how we learn.

Jump ahead with me fourteen years or so. . . . In 1973 Peter Bunnell, who brought me to Princeton to teach photography, had recently curated a small and yet prescient exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art: Photographs by Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. The timing could not have been better for me.

As I began teaching classes at Princeton, I also began to search the Museum and the Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology for inspiration, and for “revelations” I could bring to class. Marquand was a great visual resource for me at that moment, holding endless surprises. The Museum was a place of such wonderful solitude and profound discovery, with exhibitions every few months and truly life-affirming collections. I could hardly contain my excitement.

On one of my first Museum wanderings, I stumbled across three exquisite slender volumes, the etchings of a seventeenth-century Dutch artist, Hercules Seghers—an artist now known especially for the expressive originality of his prints, his use of overpainting, his sheer inventiveness, but of whom I had heard almost nothing. An hour later I felt different, changed. I had a hero for life, and new ideas about what a photographic print could be. A black-and-white print, I then realized, could be more than I had thought, and the quality of color, of time, and of space in a Seghers print was a powerful match for my feelings, and for where I was headed. In this case, a museum visit was the window onto a new understanding in my own work.

We like to speak of influence, but I prefer to think of being awakened or imprinted with a vividly personal experience. And nothing works better than chance. Images can speak to us directly, opening our hearts and minds in new ways. Our lives are the lasting effect of things that we did not intend to see, or people we did not intend to meet, but that changed us anyway, enriched our lives without the restriction of intention. “When we are free of our projects,” Frederick Sommer reminds us, “then we can fit back into the world.” Besides, as he says, “Only chance is fair.”

I’d like to end on a personal note, a point of convergence that’s like that moment when someone from whom you had not heard from for years calls, and you are led to say, “I was just thinking about you.”

A headline in the Museum’s Spring 2024 magazine read, “The Museum Welcomes the Emmet Gowin Archive.” Naturally, my wife, Edith, and I were very excited to be thus honored. Our archive could not have found a better home. 

Turning the page, we found a second story, one which reconnected me personally with my first weeks on campus and my long engagement with Hercules Seghers.

For Seghers, every impression from each copper plate was an original. At the time of his death, Rembrandt is said to have owned about twenty-seven works by Seghers, and in this case, he owned the copper plate itself. Rembrandt completely changed the right side of the plate for Tobias and the Great Fish or Tobias and the Angel. He burnished away the great fish, Tobias, and the Angel, changing the subject as well as the composition. The story in the magazine announced that the Museum had just acquired a thrilling print from that altered plate.

I am glad to say all of this was simply chance at work, rather than a small conspiracy. Needless to say, it is a personal joy for us to join in the welcome of this long-admired image into Princeton’s collection. Edith and I feel that we are very lucky . . . and in exquisite company.

Emmet Gowin 
Professor of Visual Arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts, Emeritus