Interested in capturing both transience and change, Emmet Gowin delved into photography influenced by great masters such as Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson but preferred to direct his camera toward the private spaces of his family life and immediate surroundings. In the mid 1960s his wife and her family, their children, and his parents became the central subjects of his work. The interiors of their homes as well as their porches, rear patios, and backyards were the settings where Gowin portrayed his loved ones using a large-format view camera.

In this photograph Gowin’s wife, Edith Morris, is pictured next to her grandmother, Rennie Booher, who also appeared in other photographs including a final one from 1972, on the day of her funeral, inside her coffin. Gowin depicted the intimacy of the domestic space with spontaneity and formal audacity. This photograph was taken in Danville (Virginia), the city where both the photographer and his wife were from, but belongs to a period when the Gowins were living in Dayton due to Gowin’s work as a professor at Dayton Art Institute.