In an interview with Sally Gall, for BOMB magazine, Emmet Gowin spoke about his understanding of photography as an extension of the artist’s being.

“You can’t be an artist and have your identity reside in only one thing. The thing that you master will become a stranger to you, and you will outlive it or you will need to live into something else. You will always need to be educating yourself to the complexity of your feelings as they grow, and you don’t want to do something twice, really. 

“Everything that makes you an artist in a sense is the way things are understood; how they fit together in ways that have not been understood before. How can you discover the inherent value that’s hidden in things that you haven’t yet seen? It’s in that sense that you want to do something new. And you know that it’s chance that’s going to put those things together. Only chance can bring together new combinations in a way that is revolutionary. No one ever discovered anything really important intentionally…. 

 
Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Old Hanford City Site and the Columbia River, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, near Richland, Washington, 1986. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmetand Edith Gowin

Right: Lelio Orsi (Italian, 1511-1587), Apotheosis of Hercules as a Genius, ca. 1536. Pen and brown ink, over traces of black chalk. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909. 
Hanford, where plutonium was processed for the Manhattan Project, became so contaminated that it needed to be scraped off the face of the earth. Gowin first saw Hanford from a plane on a return trip to Mount St. Helens. His fortuitous encounter with “the ghost of a city” prompted a decisive move into aerial work. The troubled state of the planet, he felt, called for “a new mythology.” From the museum’s online exhibition website.

“The photograph gives a physical embodiment to our experience. We’re looking for something that puts our unspeakable feelings into a discreet form, so that we ourselves can back off and study what we’ve done. And in a sense, recognize our own feelings as an object."

How they fit together in ways that have not been understood before is the theme of the exhibition, Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan. Invited by the museum to select works from its permanent collection to pair with works by the photographer also in the collection, Gowin made diverse and surprising choices, working with curator of photograph Joel Smith.

His own work, which ranges from intimate photographs of his wife, children, and extended family to aerial photographs of desolate landscapes (including the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption), is paired with drawings, a watercolor and ink illustration by William Blake, manuscript scores, anonymous snapshots, and even a page from the first book about palm reading ever printed. Gowin reaches into distant realms, from mythology to the spirit world, to suggest a mystic reality that exists just beyond the surface of things.

Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan continues through September 20. Tonight at 6:30 pm the museum presents a gallery talk with interpreter Michelle Donnelly. In addition, there is a docent tour at 2 pm [Every Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday through September 20]. Information. The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue at 36^th Street, NY, NY. Information. Read the entire interview in BOMB.