Born in Danville, VA in 1941, Gowin studied with Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, earning his MFA in 1967. During school, Gowin began taking intimate portraits of his wife Edith and family members, for which he is widely known today. For over twenty years, Gowin has also photographed aerially, capturing massive agriculture and irrigation projects, strip mines, atomic test sites, and other scars in the natural landscape all over the world. This image is from his “Nevada Test Site” series and depicts the U.S. Department of Energy's reservation pockmarked from over 50 years of nuclear testing. Related images from this body of work were featured in the catalogue that accompanied a major traveling exhibition of his aerial photography, Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth (2002). A Guggenheim and two-time NEA Fellowship recipient, Gowin is represented in international museums and widely exhibited. Gowin spoke at the PRC in 1985 and was featured in the exhibition, Anxious Libraries: Photography and the Fate of Reading, in 1996. A professor of photography at Princeton University since 1973, Gowin is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York. He lives in Newtown, PA.