Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill present Emmet Gowin: The Nevada Test Site, a presentation of aerial photographs surveying theuniquely scarred landscape of America’s primary nuclear testing location for over four decades. Opening on October 25 and on viewthrough December 21, 2019, the exhibition coincides with the publication of Gowin’s latest monograph, The Nevada Test Site, byPrinceton University Press and marks his debut at Pace’s new Chelsea location.
Since 1980, renowned American photographer Emmet Gowin has explored both the natural and man-made alteration of the earth’s surface from an airborne perspective. Finding that “from the air, places and subjects usually forbidden or inaccessible were now fully visible, with a scope and wholeness that a close-up or ground view could never provide,” he has created formally abstract and luminouscompositions of the volcanic devastation of Washington’s Mount St. Helens, the chemical contamination of the Hanford NuclearReservation, pivot irrigation agriculture in Kansas, the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic, and most recently, the Spanishprovince of Granada.
Following a nearly decade-long pursuit with the U.S. Department of Energy, Gowin secured permission to make aerial photographs of theNevada National Security Test Site in 1996, and remains the only photographer granted official and continued access to the reservation. Located about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, this area of desert and mountainous terrain sustained over 900 nuclear detonations between 1951 and 1992, creating a landscape at the Nevada Test Site like no other on earth.
Made over the course of five flights between 1996 and 1997, Gowin’s photographs portray blast areas where sand has beentransformed to glass, valleys pockmarked with hundreds of subsidence craters, protective troop placement trenches, radioactive waste burial grounds, and leftover debris from tests conducted as deep as 5,000 feet below the earth’ssurface. Each image is accompanied by exact location coordinates and, when possible, test and yield details to ground the visualexperience and relate the testing and its history to our own place in time.
Together, these visually stunning yet unsettling views reveal environmental travesties on a monumental scale. The Nevada Test Sitestands as a testament to the disquieting effects of human intervention, the importance of bearing witness to the history of nuclear proliferation and, ultimately, the possibility for redemption through a reconsideration of our relationship with and responsibility to our surroundings. Gowin states: “The astonishing thing to me is that in spite of all we have done, the earth still offers back so much beauty,so much sustenance. So much of what we need is embodied in it. If we treat things in accord with what we believe they’re worth, then the value of the world is something that we imagine. The thing that we can do for the world is always expressed in terms of how we treatthe world and each other, the quality of our behavior.”
Emmet Gowin (b. 1941, Danville, Va.) received a BFA in Graphic Design from the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in 1965 and an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967. He served on the faculty of Princeton University as a professor of photography in the Visual Arts Program from 1973 until his retirement in 2009, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1977, 1979), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1993), the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University (1997), and the Princeton Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (2006).
Emmet Gowin : The Nevada Test Site
Presented in collaboration with Pace/MacGill October 25 – December 21, 2019
540 West 25th Street, Third Floor New York
