Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 1, 1992                   TAG: 9202270164
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JEFF DeBELL
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PHOTOGRAPHER SPEAKS OF HIS COLLABORATION WITH LIFE

"I prefer not to use the `shoot' word," said the 50-year-old master photographer, whose wife, Edith, has been one of his most consistent and compelling subjects. "Imagine being in my place if someone said, `Do you still shoot your wife?' "

Gowin made the quip as an ice-breaker during a workshop at the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts last week. It was part of a flurry of attention for Gowin in his native state, all of it related to the current Gowin retrospective at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

There was a lecture and workshop in Richmond, a workshop in Norfolk, the Roanoke workshop and - starting Thursday and continuing for one month - a small exhibit of the photographer's work at the Roanoke museum.

Gowin is a Danville native. He attended Richmond Professional Institute, did graduate work at the Rhode Island School of Design and teaches at Princeton University - where, he likes to joke, "I couldn't get in" as a student.

It was at RPI (now Virginia Commonwealth University) that the unworldly son of a Danville preacher discovered the supra-journalistic possibilities of photography. Without them even knowing it, he said, "I did a four-year apprenticeship with Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson."

Gowin began to attract notice in the late 1960s with photographs of his wife and her family, later expanding his interest to include more of their living environment in Danville. He moved on to what he calls "the changing Earth," those changes being wrought by both man and nature.

"Nature is a print of where the forces had been," he said at the workshop, while showing his artful photographic record of the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption.

Most recently, the photographer has been directing his "non-linguistic statements" toward a landscape laid waste by the nuclear power industry, open-pit mining and other depredations.

Gowin said his best work has a sense of "placeness" for which he cannot take full credit.

"It was given to me out of life," he said. "I didn't make it up. It was a collaboration."

The photographer does not crop his negatives.

"When you get a negative that's worth printing, it's all worth printing," he said. "The way life was transferred to the image, that's what you can't fool around with."

Gowin told the 15 or so workshop attendees, many of them photographers, that there is always a "margin of error" between what we think we see and what's really there.

"That's how you learn," he said. "The reason photography is When you get a negative that's worth printing, it's all worth printing. The way life was transferred to the image, that's what you can't fool around with. Emmet Gowin such an advantageous process is that it shows what's really there."

Without being a candidate, John Frohnmayer is one of the first casualties of the political season. He's chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which long has been under attack from political conservatives for funding sexually explicit art.

Frohnmayer had survived, though it was known that President Bush would not be disappointed if he chose another line of work. Last week, White House staff chief Samuel Skinner went ahead and fired him.

According to press reports, both friends and foes of the chairman said he was sacrificed to appease the political right in light of arch-conservative Patrick Buchanan's strong showing in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

In the arts community, there was shock. The remarks of Ruth Appelhof, director of the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, were typical:

"It's frightening to think that the leader of our nation has taken such a direct and negative position against the arts at a time when this gentleman has carefully balanced the concerns of the most avant garde artists with those of a very conservative constituency, and done a very good job of it."

Instead of such a "knee-jerk response" to political pressure, she said, government should be concerned with "the bigger issue, which is to integrate the arts into our daily lives. This is a time to preserve our history and our culture, because I think that's what makes us human. In such a stressful time economically, we need the opportunity to explore our humanness."