Baldwin Street

A legendary American photographer’s intimate pictures of his family in a small Virginia town, published here for the first timePhotographer Emmet Gowin first gained renown in the late 1960s with a remarkable series of pictures of his wife, Edith, their children, and four generations of her family, many of whom lived in a cluster of houses at the end of Baldwin Street in the mill town of Danville, Virginia. These images of the family’s daily life and gatherings are among Gowin’s most admired. Baldwin Street is a stunning new collection of photographs from that world. Most of these photographs have never been published, and many were printed for the first time during the Covid pandemic after Gowin rediscovered the negatives. Together, they represent a fascinating and thrilling expansion of his important early work. In a preface, Gowin describes Baldwin Street as a “small but intensely vivid world,” teeming with Edith’s family—including her grandmother, mother, sisters, brothers-in-law, and many children. “It was here that I came of age and found my first true subject,” Gowin writes, and Baldwin Street became nothing less than “the center of my spiritual universe,” a place where “the kingdom of heaven seemed to be all around us.” These beautiful and moving photographs capture and express this feeling of the otherworldly and numinous amid everyday life. Featuring close to seventy photographs, this gorgeously produced volume includes a new interview with Emmet and Edith Gowin offering further details about the family and the images, with memories and reflections by the photographer about the period when the pictures were made.