EMMET GOWIN – THE NEVADA TEST SITE
2019-10-28Since 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 luminous compositions of the volcanic devastation of Washington’s Mount St. Helens, the chemical contamination of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, pivot irrigation agriculture in Kansas, the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic, and most recently, the Spanish province of Granada.
Following a nearly decade-long pursuit with the U.S. Department of Energy, Gowin secured permission to make aerial photographs of the Nevada 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.
Opposite – Subsidence Craters, Looking Southeast From Area 8, Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site, 1996
Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019
Pace/MacGill Gallery
540 West 25th St
New York
10022 NY
