Jackson Fine Art is honored to bring to Atlanta two of the most distinguished and influential photographers working today, Emmet Gowin and Richard Benson. Gowin (a professor at Princeton from 1973-2010) and Benson (a professor at Yale from 1979- 2011) have both taught and cultivated many of the leading contemporary artists and photographers working today. 

Emmet Gowinʼs exhibition marks a 50-year career spanning from his early unforgettable, honest, and tender exploration of family and domesticity. Following his marriage to Edith in 1964, he began taking intimate photographs of his new wife and family in the small town of Danville, Virginia. Using the exquisite and classic silver gelatin print process, Gowinʼs photographs take the viewer into his personal everyday rituals of aunts, cousins and his own children playing in the backyard to the familiarity of chaos on Christmas morning. Through his brilliant composition and perfection in printmaking, he transforms these mundane moments of the everyday into extraordinary visual family albums and histories, ultimately painting his own self-portrait through these frozen moments of simplicity and beauty. Gowin states, “Sometimes my photographs resemble home snapshots, which are among the richest resources of images I know. But I always want to make a picture that is more than a family record. I feel that the clearest pictures were at first strange to me; yet whatever picture an artist makes, it is in part a picture of himself—a matter of identity.” Even in the slowness of these long days, one looks back and realizes these captured portraits of early family are some of the most treasured moments. On view as well is a selection of Gowinʼs noted aerial landscape photographs taken in the 1980s. As an early environmentalist, Gowin examines the global impact of irrigation, mining, and weapon testing in the United States, as well as the Middle East and Mexico. In looking at these elegant lined abstractions, the photographs without a trace of human existence become “records of human actions tracing out all of the lines humans have etched” in the land.