'Concerning America and Alfred Stieglitz, and Myself'

Emmett Gowin published this important book while still a student at Virginia Community College. Writing about it in his first monograph in 1976, Gowin says: 'From the beginning I wanted to make pictures so potent that I would not need to say anything about them.' While Gowin's debt to Stieglitz is explicit in his title, the child-like drawings on the book's cover are reminiscent of Saul Steinberg's for the Delpire first edition of Robert Frank's The Americans, another important influence.
The volume is inscribed to Harold Jones, appointed the first director of Light Gallery, New York in 1971 and who became the founding director of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson in 1975.