Left: After Andrea Mantegna (Italian, 1431-1506), St. Christopher, ca. 1500. Red chalk. Gift of János Scholz, 1993.126
Right: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Gowin photographed his niece and nephew as they caught their breath, having wrestled on the grass “long enough that they went from being mad to being reconciled.” In his own work and that of others, Gowin is drawn to visual ambiguities between tragedy and beauty, ferocity and tenderness, passion and pain—tensions vividly present, for example, in many Christian images of martyrdom.