Elijah Gowin

A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, Gowin uses photography to speak about ritual, landscape, and memory. His photographs use images both captured with his camera and collected from the Internet. Gowin's work examines the human experience in moments of spiritual and physical transition, as exemplified by the series Of Falling and Floating, where figures are caught between land and sky. In 2008, he founded Tin Roof Press to publish his books on art and photography, including Maggie in 2009 and his monograph Of Falling and Floating in 2011. Gowin was raised in Newtown, PA and is the son of American photographer Emmet Gowin.

His photographs range from direct views of the sun or photographs of snow with a flash, to manipulated scenes of riverside baptisms or haunting pictures of falling bodies. In some of his work, Gowin searches for vernacular images of his given theme and manipulates them into unique prints. To create pictures of falling bodies, Gowin layered the images and then printed the photographs as small fibrous paper negatives. Afterward, they were scanned onto another sheet of paper so that the end result incorporates the entire process into the texture.

Gowin received a B.A. from Davidson College (1990) and an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of New Mexico (1996). Presently, he is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he directs photographic studies. He is represented by the Robert Mann Gallery in New York.