Emmet Gowin
Agricultural Pivots on the Snake River Plain near the Confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, Washington

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Artist Emmet Gowin (American, born 1941)American, born 1941

CultureAmerican

Titles

Agricultural Pivots on the Snake River Plain near the Confluence of the Snake and Columbia Rivers, Washington

Date1991

PlaceWashington, United States

MediumGelatin silver print with toning

DimensionsImage: 9 3/8 × 9 7/16 in. (23.8 × 24 cm)
Sheet: 10 7/8 × 13 7/8 in. (27.7 × 35.3 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by W. Burt Nelson in honor of Marjorie Nelson Riettini, The Manfred Heiting Collection

Object number2002.1195

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Manfred Heiting Collection of Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionAlthough Emmet Gowin is best known for making intimate portraits of his wife and family, he has also explored aerial landscape photography since the 1980s. The artist expresses concerns over human impacts on the environment via pivot irrigation, natural resource mining, and weapons testing, and this ideological focus of the series strikes a balance with the abstraction of the imagery. Taken from a perspective unusual to landscape photography, the photographs lose any sense of scale to the patterns and formations, relishing in the ambiguity of visual beauty and destruction.
Provenance[Manfred Heiting, Malibu, California]; purchased by MFAH, 2002.
Exhibition History“The Will to Architecture,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, April 1–July 6, 2014.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Marked in pencil verso bottom:
"AGRICULTURAL RIVETS IN THE SNAKE RIVER PLAIN NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE SNAKE / And COLUMBIA RIVERS, WASHINTON 1991

Marked in pencil verso right edge:
"Forte H Apo (?) 10 @ 5.6 (?)"

Marked in pencil verso top right corner:
"Eg.232"

Marked in pencil verso bottom:
"Emmet Gowin"

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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