At its core is Emmet Gowin, who studied with Harry Callahan and formed a lasting friendship with Frederick Sommer. Bringing together 53 iconic, rare, and vintage photographs, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see their work in dialogue, with a depth and focus that is unlikely to be seen again.
Born in Detroit and self-taught, Harry Callahan became one of the most influential American photographers of the twentieth century, developing the visual vocabulary of photographic modernism. He taught for many years at the Institute of Design in Chicago—at the invitation of László Moholy-Nagy—and later at the Rhode Island School of Design. In his teaching, Callahan often assigned students problems he was simultaneously trying to solve himself, collapsing the distance between the classroom and his own evolving practice.
“I think photography is an exploration. You start from scratch and learn things as you go along.”
For Callahan, photography was a daily discipline. His work demonstrates that even the most familiar subjects can be abstracted—whether photographing his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara, or the streets, architecture, and everyday life of Chicago—using each as a platform for formal experimentation. He returned repeatedly to the same subjects, developing a rigorous lexicon of repetition and seriality; in-camera multiple exposures; shifts in scale; high-contrast printing and minimalism; pre-focused street photography; color work; and photographic collage. Through this sustained daily engagement, the ordinary became a platform for formal invention.
Born in Italy, raised in Brazil, and educated at Cornell University, Frederick Sommer built his artistic life in the Arizona desert, where he lived and worked for most of his adult life. His photography was deeply embedded in a network of mid-century artistic exchange. He corresponded with Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, while friendships with artists such as Max Ernst and Aaron Siskind placed him in dialogue with Surrealism and postwar photographic modernism. A polymath who spoke five languages and was part of a wide-ranging intellectual network, his practice unfolded across photography, drawing, collage, music, and writing.
“You have to make it to find it, or you have to find it to make it,” Sommer observed, collapsing the boundary between observation and construction.
Sommer’s images move easily between these two poles: from portraits made in the Arizona landscape and studies of dead coyotes to complex assemblages of found objects—doll and chicken parts, fragments of printed matter, paper, and material debris. He also developed experimental processes, including cut-paper constructions and cameraless images made with paint on cellophane or other transparent surfaces, where the photograph becomes the residue of an imaginative and transformative act.
Emmet Gowin’s work was shaped by both Callahan and Sommer, while remaining distinctly his own. Born in Danville, Virginia, Emmet Gowin studied at the Rhode Island School of Design with Harry Callahan and, after graduating, met and formed a close friendship with Frederick Sommer. His work emerged between these two positions, but was also shaped by his mother’s Quaker beliefs (Gowin later became a Quaker), bringing to photography a belief in the “Inner Light”—that attention is a form of respect, and that how we look at the world matters. Gowin became a student of his own work: in his teaching at Princeton University, he often assigned students a project and then revisited photographs he made at their age, treating his own archive as a field of inquiry, and teaching as a continuation of practice rather than separate from it.
“It’s what you do every day that counts… it’s really little increments of behavior that form a kind of aesthetic life.”
In the 1960s, Gowin began making intimate photographs of his wife, Edith, and her extended family in Danville, Virginia—work that reflected a rootedness in the everyday from the outset. As that attentiveness extended outward, Gowin also made aerial images of environmental and man-made destruction at Mount St. Helens, pivot irrigation circles across the Great Plains, and the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant. That tension between beauty and violence, as Terry Tempest Williams has written, is central to Gowin’s work, and gives it its quiet force, placing him in a shared lineage with his mentors, Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer.
Across all three artists, the ordinary is transformed through personal expression and formal invention.
