As I worked, I soon realized that I was not able to foresee the best pictures and often could not identify the better negative until much later. This meant that in my future efforts there would be an element dedicated to what can't be foreseen—to risk and to chance. (It turns out that “The unknown is more friendly than we think,”; as D.H. Lawrence said, “Even an artist knows that his work was never in his mind, he could never have thought it before it happened.” Rarely am I tempted to speak of originality.) That simply means that I am responsible for it—that I accept the consequences. ... I had set out to describe the world within my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things—which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do. Now I would prefer to say: As things teach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world.
— Emmet Gowin, Photographs, p.101