Gowin, Emmet. The One Hundred Circle Farm by Emmet Gowin.

Princeton University Press, 2022.  Hardcover, new in shrink-wrap. First edition. Afterword by Lucas Bessire. 

Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) is a celebrated American photographer and educator whose work transitions from intimate,domestic portraiture to expansive, ecological aerial photography. Raised in Danville, Virginia, Gowin studied graphic design at Richmond Professional Institute before earning his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967 under the mentorship of Harry Callahan. He first gained critical acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s for poignant, large-format family portraits of his wife, Edith Morris, and her extended family in rural Virginia, often utilizing round-aperture lenses that framed subjects within dark, circular vignettes. Over the subsequent decades, Gowin broadened his scope to global landscape photography, employing high-contrast aerial perspectives to document human impacts on the earth, including nuclear testing sites, center-pivot irrigation patterns, and strip mines. A legendary professor of photography at Princeton University for 25 years (1973–2009), Gowin’s photographs are held in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.

The One Hundred Circle Farm by photographer Emmet Gowin presents a aerial photographic survey of center-pivot irrigation systems across the western and midwestern United States. Made over several decades, Gowin’s square-format,high-contrast black-and-white aerial images transform vast industrial agricultural plots into geometry, rendering crop circles against arid terrain. Beyond their abstract aesthetic, the photographs serve as a poignant environmental document—visualizing human intervention in natural ecosystems and probing the looming ecological crisis of groundwater depletion across the High Plains and Ogallala Aquifer.