Emmet Gowin Quotes

#1. I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."

Emmet Gowin

#2. This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.

Emmet Gowin

#3. We don't tell everything we know about ourselves. We tell those things that we feel have a chance poetically of fitting back into life and that means fitting back into the feelings of other people.

Emmet Gowin

#4. The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

Emmet Gowin

#5. The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

Emmet Gowin

#6. I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously.

Emmet Gowin

#7. I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.

Emmet Gowin

#8. As a good picture would come, I would never know exactly what I had done. When you did see it, it would strike you as a great surprise - who did that? How did it happen? Being surprised by your own work makes you both less serious and have serious reverence.

Emmet Gowin

#9. Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn't attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don't see.

Emmet Gowin

#10. We tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see.

Emmet Gowin

#11. I need to say to you. There are things in your life that only you will see, stories that only you will hear. If you don't tell them or write them down, if you don't make the picture, these things will not be seen, these things will not be heard.

Emmet Gowin

#12. I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

Emmet Gowin

#13. Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'

Emmet Gowin

#14. Photography is such an important instrument in the education of our feelings and perception because of its duality. Photography represents the world we know, and suggests a world beyond what we can see. Creativity is the gap between perception and knowledge.

Emmet Gowin

#15. All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.

Emmet Gowin

#16. The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed to us

Emmet Gowin

#17. For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.

Emmet Gowin

#18. You're always working at the margin of what you don't understand, that's the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

Emmet Gowin

#19. I am pessimistic about a picture's power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, "Here I am, this is what I am like," and the person seeing the picture says in return, 'You know a lot but you don't know half of what I know.'

Emmet Gowin