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Baldwin Street

Photographs 1966–1994

Emmet Gowin

$89.99

Hardback

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English
Princeton University Press
19 May 2026
A legendary American photographer's intimate pictures of his family in a small Virginia town, published here for the first time

Photographer Emmet Gowin first gained renown in the late 1960s with a remarkable series of pictures of his wife, Edith, their children, and four generations of her family, many of whom lived in a cluster of houses at the end of Baldwin Street in the mill town of Danville, Virginia. These images of the family's daily life and gatherings are among Gowin's most admired. Baldwin Street is a stunning new collection of photographs from that world. Most of these photographs have never been published, and many were printed for the first time during the Covid pandemic after Gowin rediscovered the negatives. Together, they represent a fascinating and thrilling expansion of his important early work.

In a preface, Gowin describes Baldwin Street as a ""small but intensely vivid world,"" teeming with Edith's family-including her grandmother, mother, sisters, brothers-in-law, and many children. ""It was here that I came of age and found my first true subject,"" Gowin writes, and Baldwin Street became nothing less than ""the center of my spiritual universe,"" a place where ""the kingdom of heaven seemed to be all around us."" These beautiful and moving photographs capture and express this feeling of the otherworldly and numinous amid everyday life.

Featuring close to seventy photographs, this gorgeously produced volume includes a new interview with Emmet and Edith Gowin offering further details about the family and the images, with memories and reflections by the photographer about the period when the pictures were made.
By:  
Imprint:   Princeton University Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 270mm,  Width: 241mm, 
ISBN:   9780691293035
ISBN 10:   0691293031
Pages:   128
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) is a world-renowned American photographer and professor emeritus of photography at Princeton University. His many books include The One Hundred Circle Farm, The Nevada Test Site, and Mariposas Nocturnas (all Princeton). His photographs are in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Tokyo Museum of Art.

Reviews for Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994

""Many of the black-and-white photographs that follow are as casual as snapshots, but they’re far from simple documents. They’re often posed, without feeling formal. Children dart into the frame. A sitter’s attention skitters off. A group disbands. Gowin isn’t in any of these pictures, but his presence—loving, amused, amazed—defines them, giving the work a lovely intensity, a glow. You sense that, in the moment, there was nowhere else Gowin wanted to be than on this lawn, in this kitchen, with these people. And what a pleasure it is to be there, too. . . . The pictures in “Baldwin Street” remind us of the pleasure of looking and the rewards of being alive to the world.""---Vince Aletti, New Yorker ""The images [in Baldwin Street] are timely reminders to bear witness, to honor, and, above all, to love.""---Janelle Lynch, LensCulture


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