In the early 1960s Emmet Gowin attended classes at the Richmond Professional Institute (Virginia) where, aside from photography, he studied drawing, painting, and art history. During those years he became interested in a wide range of artistic media: from early Christian illuminated manuscripts, to Flemish painting, to the work of Henri Matisse and Willem de Kooning.

Inspired by the naturalists of the 19^th century, such as Jean-Henri Fabre and Alfred Russel Wallace, throughout his artistic career Gowin photographed and cataloged thousands of insect specimens in the tropical jungles of Central and South America. In 2001, during a trip he took to the border between Panama and Colombia alongside two biologists, he produced the series entitled Mariposas Nocturnas: Edith in Panama, which was exhibited in 2006 and published in an eponymous book. In this project, the photographic and artistic influences he acquired during his early years were directly applied to his preferred motifs: his wife and nature. Through several photographic manipulations Gowin produced a series of poetic images in which he combined forest leaves, the flight path of a moth, butterflies, and other insects with his wife Edith’s silhouette.