Intimate Photographs of Family Life in Small-Town Virginia Published for the First Time

A legendary American photographer’s intimate pictures of his wife’s family in a small Virginia town have been published for the first time in a new book.

Acclaimed American photographer Emmet Gowin first became known for his images of his wife Edith and their sons and extended family in and around Danville, Virginia, in the late 1960s. These images, which include portraits of Edith, her three sisters and their families, as well as Gowin’s own relatives, capture everyday family life in a small community centered around Baldwin Street, a dead-end road surrounded by woods where Edith’s sisters, mother, and grandmother lived in six nearby houses.

Gowin’s new book Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994 (published by Princeton University Press) brings together images from this series, many of which have not been published before.

Gowin was born in Danville in 1941, about a mile from Baldwin Street. By the time he met Edith in 1960, he was living elsewhere in the town, where his father was a Methodist minister. The couple married in 1964, and Edith’s extended family — including farmers, mill workers, housewives, and clergy — became what Gowin described as “my first true subject.” Edith’s “feminine clan” was markedly different from Gowin’s own family, which led him to develop a close connection with them through photography.

“Through my marriage to Edith Morris, in 1964, I entered a family freshly different from my own,” Gowin writes in the introduction of the book. “I admired their simplicity and generosity and thought of the pictures I made as agreements. I wanted to pay attention to the body and personality that agreed out of love to reveal itself. My attention was natural duty that could honor that love.”

The photographs Gowin made of family gatherings and daily life on Baldwin Street became some of his most recognized work and are held in the collections of institutions including MoMA and other major museums around the world. A large number of the photographs were printed for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic after Gowin rediscovered the original negatives, revealing a wider view of this important body of work.

The book includes a preface by Gowin about Baldwin Street and its significance to him, as well as an interview with Emmet and Edith Gowin by Joel Smith exploring the family’s history. It also features commentary on selected images from Emmet, and sometimes Edith, providing further insight into the photographer’s approach and the process behind documenting the family over several decades.

Baldwin Street: Photographs 1966–1994 by Emmet Gowin (published by Princeton University Press) can be purchased here.