Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Avebury Stone and Rennie Booher, England and Danville, Virginia, 1972. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Sandro Botticelli (Italian, 1444/45-1510), Horses and Spectators (Fragment of an Adoration of the Kings), ca. 1500-05. Brush and brown ink or tempera, heightened with white, over traces of black chalk, on three pieces of prepared linen stitched together. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, I, 5
This photograph took shape when Gowin accidentally double-exposed a negative. He thus combined a funerary image of his wife’s grandmother, Rennie Booher, with the surface of a Neolithic monumental stone he had photographed in England a few days earlier. Examining a fragment of a painting by Botticelli, Gowin was struck by the way time has turned the linen into a complex substrate: to his eye, the figures seem to emerge from a raw block of stone. “A work of art reveals itself physically,” he emphasizes. “It isn’t [only] what the artist says it meant. It’s what you experience as it reaches into the future.”