Portraits of women – by the men who loved them

Sean O’Hagan writes in The Guardian about a new exhibition in Madrid.

Some of the greatest photos ever taken were by men whose muses were their own wives, as two breathtaking shows at PhotoEspaña 2013 prove

Edith, 1963 by Emmet Gowin

The Azca gallery is tucked at the back of a shopping mall opposite Real Madrid’s towering Bernabeu Stadium. It’s the unlikely setting for one of the most interesting shows in this year’s PhotoEspaña festival: the first European retrospective of the American photographer Emmet Gowin. The show includes his later landscapes, the most dramatic of which capture the volcano Mount St Helens in Washington, US, just after it erupted in 1980. But it is his images of home and family that remain his most evocative……Gowin studied under the great Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, another photographer who made his wife his enduring subject. Callahan’s work is paired with that of Edward Weston in an exhibition at PhotoEspaña entitled……

Edward Weston, Untitled. Photograph: Edward Weston / Center for Creative Photography

It is a study in contrasts, with Weston’s formal approach turning every nude female into a study of light, shade and shape, while Callahan’s images of his wife, Eleanor seem more intimate and less rigorously posed……..

Read the full article here

If you are going to Spain then you might like to check out this exhibition

International Festival
of photography and visual arts