mysteriesmanners:

Edith and Elijah, Danville, Virginia, 1971

When Gowin was 2, the family moved to Chincoteague Island, where he wandered the marshes sketching birds and plants and marveling at the changes he saw in nature. In his early teens, he saw an Ansel Adams photo of a burned stump sprouting new shoots, which the minister’s son immediately knew was an image of resurrection. “I had never thought of a photograph as anything but a representation of what it was,” he muses. “I was defenseless [before it]. I thought it was Christ. This was the body dead and resurrected. But it had been transformed: It was not the same matter it left the world in. That was closer to my own theology, too.”  

…

He was saved, in a way, the night he went to a dance and met Edith Morris, who became his wife in 1964 and remains among his most important photographic subjects. Theirs is a collaboration of equals. Even now, when he talks about their marriage, Gowin’s voice trembles with emotion: “If you are married, if you think you love somebody, that’s the sacred moment in your life,” he says. “Treat it as if it’s sacred.”

Some of their dates took them driving down into North Carolina — “just holding hands and kissing every so often, the way you do,” says Gowin — where they visited a black church out in the country, and he shyly asked for permission to take some pictures. The minister appealed to the congregation. “Amen!” the people roared. (Source)