Emmet Gowin Quotes

For me, pictures provide a means of holding, intensely, a moment of communication between one human and another.

You’re always working at the margin of what you don’t understand, that’s the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time.

Photography is a tool for dealing with things everybody knows about but isn’t attending to. My photographs are intended to represent something you don’t see.

I want my photographs to say: "Look-there's this thing you haven't seen that you should see."

We tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see.

The picture is like a prayer, an offering, and hopefully an opening through which to seek what we don't know, or already know and should take seriously.

This is the gift of the landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.

All important pictures embody something that we do not yet understand.

I was going round the world searching for an interesting place, when I realized that the place that I was in was already interesting.

The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.

The challenge of photography is to show the thing photographed so that our feelings are awakened and hidden aspects are revealed to us

I feel that whatever picture an artist makes it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.