Yet there’s very little drama in Gowin’s pictures, and any plot is sketchy or buried. The elders here are generally all of a piece—stoic, patient, dressed as simply and modestly as possible. Four sisters, Fannie, Bernice, Gertrude, and Edith’s mother, Reva, pose in loosely fitted housedresses that they made themselves from pretty printed gingham fabric that they wove in the cotton mill. It’s a fashion photograph with no designer labels. Not surprisingly, the children in Gowin’s pictures are the ones who set off the sparks. One of them, Amy, a blond child with limp ponytails and a thin dress that looks like it might have been stained, stands outside a porch door, her fists balled up, mouth open, angry or unhappy or both. Another girl, Donna Jo, apparently naked on a back-yard lawn, holds several small, round pieces of fruit, still on their leafy branch, clasped to her chest like a trophy. Gowin notes, “It is just the incarnation of Eve with apples.” It’s one of the most remarkable images in the book, and one, among many, that makes us aware of Gowin’s influence on Sally Mann.
On their own, the pictures in “Baldwin Street” remind us of the pleasure of looking and the rewards of being alive to the world. But again and again Gowin’s words, at once spontaneous and sincere, let us tap into the vivid spirit behind his camera’s canny eye. One brief caption, opposite an image of Edith and four children playing “crack the whip” on a summer lawn, sums it up: “On days when things were happening, I might be taking seven, eight rolls of film in one huge deluge of wanting to see.”
Source: Read Full Article
