Quick Facts
Biography
Elijah Gowin is an American art photographer and Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, during which he worked on a series of photographs, Of Falling and Floating. He is the son of photographer Emmet Gowin, himself a Guggenheim Fellow.
Biography
He was born in 1967 in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from Davidson College in 1990 with a BA in Art History, and was awarded an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico (1996). Since then he has taught at University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and University of Missouri, Kansas City. He acted as a judge for the University of North Dakota's juried photography exhibit Of Memory, Bone and Myth in 2010.
Of Falling and Floating
Of Falling and Floating is a series of photographs of people falling, made by collaging scanned photographs and images from the internet and reprinting them as paper negatives. It was exhibited in 2009 at the Griffin Museum of Photography as part of a show called Pull of Gravity. Mark Feeney suggested the images could be read either as representing either negative emotions like "anxiety and dislocation" or positively as images of "buoyancy, even jubilation".
Other work
His other series of photographs include Hymnal of Dreams, Watering, and Lonnie Holley. Watering used collaged digital images themed around baptism. He has had solo shows at Contemporary Art Center of Virginia (Virginia Beach, VA), Vermont Center of Photography (Brattleboro, VT), and the Light Factory (Charlotte, NC). His work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Center for Creative Photography.
Publications
Maggie (2009) was a book of photographs by Gowin and his father Emmet Gowin.