Elijah Gowin

Elijah Gowin “uses photography to speak about ritual, landscape, and memory,” according to his website. His photographs range from direct views of the sun to manipulated scenes of riverside baptisms or even pictures of falling bodies, essentially explorations of the human body in moments of the in-between. In many of his series, Gowin searches the Internet for amateur photographs of his chosen theme and then, with permission, manipulates those photographs into wholly original compositions. Gowin's process includes first collaging the images in many layers and then printing the photographs as small fibrous paper negatives. Afterward, they are scanned onto another sheet of paper, so that the result incorporates the entire process into the texture of the end result.

Gowin’s photographs have been exhibited internationally. His work is represented in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, among others. He participated in Light Work’s artist-in-residence Program in 1998, and in 2008, Gowin received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards include a Puffin Foundation Grant, the Charlotte Street Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Silver Eye Center for Photography, and more.