Effluent Holding Pond, Chemópetrol Mines, Bohemia
Emmet Gowin American
Not on view
In the 1990s Gowin chartered small aircraft to make low-level aerial studies of modern man's marks on the natural landscape. Among other subjects, he photographed circular irrigation of farmlands in the western United States and open-pit coal-mining operations in the Czech Republic. Even though we may suspect that the effluents are rife with carcinogens and the scars permanent, the photographs have an eerie, romantic beauty generated by Gowin's physical distance from the subject itself and by the intense visual pleasures of his heavily-toned silver print. Beneath the beauty, however, lies a simple truth: man is a despoiler.
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